University of California • Berkeley
University of California Bancroft Library/Berkeley
Regional Oral History Office
Edwin Grabhorn
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE GRABHORN PRESS
Francis P. Farquhar
COMMENTS ON SOME BAY AREA FINE PRINTERS
Interviews Conducted by
Ruth Teiser
Berkeley
1968
All uses of this manuscript are covered by
a legal agreement between the Regents of the
University of California and Edwin Grabhorn,
dated 1968. The manuscript is thereby made
available for research purposes. All literary
rights in the manuscript, including the right
to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft
Library of the University of California at
Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be
quoted for publication without the written
permission of the Director of The Bancroft
Library of the University of California at
Berkel ey .
Requests for permission to quote for
publication should be addressed to the Regional
Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should
include identification of the specific passages
to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages,
and identification of the user. The legal
agreement with Edwin Grabhorn requires that he
be notified of the request and allowed thirty
days in which to respond.
The two portraits of Edwin Grabhorn were painted by his
wife, Irma Grabhorn. Following his death on December 16,
1968, Mrs. Grabhorn made this statement concerning the
paintings and the unity she felt to be in Mr. Grabhorn "s
appearance, his character and his work:
"I always felt that Ed's face looked exactly like his
work, his title pages: the proportions, the lines almost
needle sharp at their turns, the fine planes, accentuated
by the eager, bright gaze. I was very much taken with
his profile, which gave away his gentleness and kindness,
a nobility so well balanced. He was so very dynamic. He
lived, in relentless rhythm, the present moment creatively.
His powerful spirit and harmoniousness are reflected in
his work, from the subject matters of his books to the
title pages, the printing types, the bindings; all are
summed up into an inextricable whole beauty."
Portraits painted 1964.
Books and Printing in the San Francisco Bay Area
Interviews Completed by October, 1968
Brother Antoninus Brother Antoninus: Poet, Printer, and
Re ligious
Edwin Grabhorn Recollections of the Grabhorn Press
Jane Grabhorn The Colt Press
Robert Grabhorn Fine Printing and the Grabhorn Press
Warren R. Howell Two San Francisco Bookmen
Haywood Hunt Recollections of San Francisco Printers
Lawton Kennedy A Life In Printing
Oscar Lewis Literary San Francisco
Bernhard Schmidt, Herman Diedrichs, Max Schmidt, Jr. The
Schmidt Lithograph Company , Vol . I
Albert Sperisen San Francisco Printers 1925-1965
Edward DeWitt Taylor, supplement to interview with Francis
Farquhar
Adrian Wilson Printing and Book Designing
INTRODUCTION
Edwin Grabhorn, whose Grabhorn Press was for many years
one of the most renowned printing enterprises of the Western
world, began his career as a music printer in an uncle's
shop in Indianapolis. As he recounts in this interview, his
first experience on the Pacific Coast was in Seattle, where
as a young man he worked as a music printer, then turned to
general printing and went into business for himself briefly.
There he first became acquainted with the work of Frederic
W. Goudy, which was to become a major influence.
The Studio Press, established in 1915 by Edwin Grabhorn
after his return to Indianapolis, brought his first national
notice, and there he printed his first books. There too his
younger brother Robert, who was to become an integral part
of the Grabhorn Press, first came to work for him between
high school terms. Together, in 1919, they journeyed to
San Francisco and the next year established The Press of Edwin
and Robert Grabhorn. By the time the name was changed to
The Grabhorn Press some five years later, their fresh,
imaginative work was creating much interest among aficionados
of fine pri nting, "and among the city's advertising agencies
for which they did considerable composition. Later, as Edwin
Grabhorn explains in this interview, the press shifted its
attention almost completely to books. They had been his
1
primary interest since boyhood when he had spent hours in the
Indianapolis public library examining title pages.
The Grabhorn Press, which continued in operation until
the end of 1965, became a legendary and rather magic place
to many. It was made so in part by its clear regard for
producing works to its own highly regarded artistic and tech
nical standards, in part by Ed Grabhorn's gregari ousness and
love of humorous tale-spinning. Some of his tales are re
flected in the numerous articles that have been written about
the press, and in David Magee's introductions to the two
Grabhorn Press bibliographies. Others are recorded for the
first time here. In addition, he here gives serious dis-
cussi on to types .
The interview was held in four sessions in 1967 (July 18,
July 21, July 25 and August 15) in the main room of the no
longer officially operating Grabhorn Press. Mr. Grabhorn had
been ill and had some difficulty in speaking, but his recol
lections were clear. No outline was followed, and rearrange
ment of the sequence of some sections was done by the inter
viewer in editing. The transcript was read to Mr. Grabhorn
by Mrs. Grabhorn; almost no changes were made.
This interview with Edwin Grabhorn comprises one of a
series of interviews on books and printing in the San Fran
cisco Bay Area that has been undertaken by the Regional Oral
History Office of the Bancroft Library on the advice of
11
Professor James D. Hart, Department of English. Most of the
other individuals interviewed in the series discussed the
Grabhorn Press, some at length. They include Robert and
Jane Grabhorn. In addition, Oscar Lewis, in his interview,
Literary San Francisco, recalled his long association with
the Grabhorn Press .
The Regional Oral History Office was established to
tape record autobiographical interviews with persons prom
inent in recent California history. The office is under the
direction of Mrs. Willa Baum, and under the administrative
supervision of the Director of The Bancroft Library.
Ruth Teiser
Intervi ewer
2 December 1968
Regional Oral History Office
Room 486 The Bancroft Library
University of California
Berkeley, California
1 i 1
CONTENTS
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE GRABHORN PRESS
by Edwin Grabhorn
Career Beginnings: Indianapolis and Seattle 1
Return to Indianapolis 9
Early Influences 14
To San Francisco 20
Anecdotes of the San Francisco Printing World 26
Presses, Types and Other Considerations 38
Collecting 62
Fine Presses and Fine Printing 71
COMMENTS ON SOME BAY AREA FINE PRINTERS
by Francis P. Farquhar
Edwin Grabhorn 87
Murdock, The Taylors, and Nash 95
Samuel T. Farquhar 101
Lawton Kennedy and Others 105
EDWIN GRABHORN
Career Begi nni ngs : Indianapolis and Seattle
Teiser: Where were you born?
Grabhorn: I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Teiser: On what date?
Grabhorn: October 29, 1889.
Teiser: How did you become interested in printing in the
first place?
Grabhorn: I'll tell you. Very simple. I had an uncle who
had a printing office in Indianapolis, Indiana, and
I went to work for him for two dollars and a half
a week.
Teiser: How old were you?
Grabhorn: About thirteen.
Teiser: What was your uncle's name?
Grabhorn: Harry, Harry Grabhorn. He had bought a printing
office and had a tremendous quantity of miscell
aneous types that were in fashion at the time.
No two types were what they call "lining." They
all were on a different line. So if you set them
up in a stick they all were up and down. They
never lined. However, each type case had a little
phrase set out of the same type that was in the
Grabhorn: case. And the phrases were i nteresti ng--"Wood-
man, spare that chestnut tree," "He's as simple
as an ostrich but he thinks he knows it all."
[Laughter] So he'd say, "Set this out: 'Woodman,
spare that chestnut tree.'"
Teiser: And that's how you learned to set type?
Grabhorn: Yes. And he had some music type, and I taught
myself how to set it.
Teiser: Did you know anything about playing any instrument?
Did you know anything about music?
Grabhorn: No, no.
Teiser: How could you learn to set music type then?
Grabhorn: Well, I he wouldn't teach me. He wanted to
keep this knowledge to himself. So I heard some
men talking. When I was a little boy I worked
for Tom Taggart in French Lick Springs, where they
bottled Pluto Water. I worked in a printing office
there. In going to visit my folks in Indianapolis
I heard some railroad men talking, waiting for
the noon train. One of them said Seattle was
going to be the [fastest growing] town of the
country. So I decided I wanted to go to Seattle.
I bought a Seattle newspaper and then wrote to
Sherman, Clay, who had an office there, and told
them I was a music printer and wanted a job, and
I wanted to come to Seattle; was there any music
3
Grabhorn: printing office? They wrote back and said, yes
they thought there was one, the Liberal Printing
Company on Pine Street. So I wrote them for a job
as a music printer. I was getting nine dollars a
week and I asked for thirteen. And they said
they could use a music printer; if I was worth
more they'd give me more than $13 a week. All my
friends didn't think I could hold down a job at
$13 a week because the union scale was only $17.40
in Indianapolis. Well, I saved $5 a week out of
my $9, and then I asked my uncle for it. He
wouldn't give it to me. I had $80 saved up. He
wouldn't give it to me without two weeks' notice.
So I was delayed a week in going to Seattle, and
I wrote them and said, "I'm delayed a week. Would
the job be open?" They wrote back and said, "The
job is open until you come." I thought that was
terribly funny. ["Laughter]
When I got to Seattle, it was run by Swedes
and one of the partners was a musician. They
wanted to set music type. They had all this music
type that they didn't know how to set. I asked for
$25 a week when I got there. They made me sign a
contract that I wouldn't ask for a wage raise
wi thin si x weeks .
Teiser: How many characters are there in a music case?
Grabhorn: There are about 450.
Teiser: I don't see how you could have learned to set
that.
Grabhorn: Oh, it's simple. You build it up like you do
blocks in the stick. You start with little pieces
and then build it up, with little pieces of type.
Teiser: This still was just ordinary printing. Did you
have at that early age a concept of fine printing?
Grabhorn: Yes. I contacted a man in Seattle who was a good
printer. He probably took the American Printer
and the Inland Printer. He had some Goudy type,
and that's where I learned about Goudy type.
Teiser: Was he Henry Anger?
Grabhorn: He was Henry Anger. Do you know him?
Teiser: I've heard of him. What was he known as?
Grabhorn: "The panel man of the Rockies." In those days,
they put rules around things and called them
panels, you know. He had some of Goudy's type.
And of course, I thought all it took to be a good
printer was the type. And I wanted some Goudy
type. I finally got some and he got mad at me
and called me the Westlake edition of his press.
Teiser: Henry Anger did?
Grabhorn: Yes. Many years later he wanted to work for me
and I wouldn't give him a job.
Teiser: Was he the only printer in Seattle who had high
pri nti ng i deals?
Grabhorn: Yes. He was.
Teiser: Haywood Hunt, I think, was in Seattle at that
time .
Grabhorn: Yes. Haywood Hunt was there too. He worked at
the Lumberman Printing Company. I knew Haywood
Hunt in Seattle.
Teiser: Did Haywood give you any idea of fine printing?
Grabhorn: No. Haywood is an old maid.
Teiser: Was he even as a young man?
Grabhorn : Yes .
Teiser: I thought he was rather inspiring to young printers.
Grabhorn: Might have been, yes. I couldn't be inspired by
Haywood. I don't know why. He was always ambitious
He was a great friend of Henry Anger.
Teiser: He remembers his early meeting with you in Seattle
with great pleasure.
Grabhorn: That's the reason I came West [to San Francisco],
Haywood Hunt.
Teiser: In Seattle you had your own first printing shopt
How did that go?
Grabhorn: Well, I'll tell you. I was too young. I wasn't
twenty-one years old, and I spent my time playing
tennis and having a good time. And I had a good
many opportunities. A lawyer took interest in me
and offered to finance me through the University
of Washington. But I didn't take it up. I thought
* — ~~
The University Press
Grabhorn: I'd be owned by the man that financed me, you see.
Teiser: Who was he?
Grabhorn: His name was Hart. He was a big lawyer in Seattle.
He said, "You don't want to be a printer all your
life, do you?" And I thought that was pretty
awful. My idea was, if you had to be a printer,
you might as well be a good one.
Teiser: So you gave up in Seattle after that early trial?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: How did you happen to leave the music printers,
incidentally?
Grabhorn: It was monotonous. I kept making lots of money,
but to set up music type is like building with
blocks. You get it up and tear it down. I used
to illustrate the symphony programs in Seattle.
Teiser: How?
Grabhorn: With music. There was a man by the name of Henry
Hadley there. He later came down to San Francisco;
became a director down here. I set up a march
for him up there.
Teiser: Did you ever do anything with music type other than
set regular music with it? Did you ever play with
it?
Grabhorn: No. I illustrated their symphony programs. The
themes going through. The reason I gave up music
type: there was a limitation to it. You set up
Grabhorn: the most complicated piece of music and you got
no more out of it. You wouldn't get the interest
out of it, of setting up display type, you know.
Teiser: Did you set up regular type with it at the same
time?
Grabhorn: Yes. I used to print a song for anybody who wrote
it for $50, and make plates of the music. One
lady, I never will forget her; she was an old
schoolteacher. She wrote a song about the sunset
and wanted a picture of the sunset on the title
page. I got a black and white cut of a sunset and
printed it. When she came to see the music, she
looked at the title page and her face kind of fell
I said, "What's the matter? It's a sunset you
wanted and I put a sunset." She said, "Yes, but
that isn't the sunset I had reference to."
[Laughter] So I learned about women from her.
Teiser: Did she pay you?
Grabhorn: She paid me.
I printed a song. There was a young man up
there who used to play the piano on the Barbary
Coast, and he was quite good. In those days, you
know, when you were pitching a piece of music, you
didn't have radio and television. You had to do
what you called plug it yourself by playing it in
a music store when people would come in. If you
8
Grabhorn: did that frequently you could probably sell a
thousand copies in a month, you know. This
young piano player from the Barbary Coast, his
name was Warren Camp. He brought me a piece of
music called, "The Rag With No Name." He sold a
thousand copies a week for six weeks. I said to
myself, "Here's a young man I've got to tie up
with." So I bought a piece of music from him.
I thought with his success with his "Rag With No
Name," my piece of music would go along with it.
He sold me a piece of music for $100, and I paid
him the $100. Going back to work the next morning,
I found he'd dropped dead from an overdose of
morphine. He couldn't take all the money, you
know. So that ended my music venture.
Teiser: Seattle must've been a pleasant place for a young
man to be.
Grabhorn: I played tennis pretty well, and so I was always
invited out to country clubs and things like that
to play tennis. The boys from San Francisco used
to come and beat the devil out of them. Morris
Mclaughlin. In fact, there was a tennis club out
in Golden Gate Park run by an old man name Dr.
Martin. He built up all those famous tennis
pi ayers .
Teiser: Did you continue playinq when you were in San
Frdnci so?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Return to Indianapoli s^
Teiser: Let's go back. ...you left Seattle then and went
back to Indianapolis, did you?
Grabhron: Yes. I kept getting letters from my mother,
what a good town Indianapolis had become. First
when I went back I was so disappointed. It was
dirty as could be. Being an inland town, the
papers stayed in the street. Seattle was built
on hills. They just went to the top of the hills
and turned on the hoses and washed everything
down into the ocean. It was clean.
Teiser: So Indianapolis looked dirty to you when you
returned?
Grabhorn: Yes. And when a streetcar would go down the
street it would go so fast that it would drag a
cloud of dust behind it.
Teiser: But you stayed for some years in Indianapolis?
Grabhorn: I stayed five years.
Teiser: It was then that you started the Studio Press?
Grabhorn: Yes. And it was Haywood Hunt writing to me about
the beauty of San Francisco that brought me West.
Teiser: You must have developed in Indianapolis.
Grabhorn: I developed in a sense, yes. I met interesting
people. I met a professor of English literature
10
Grabhorn: in Purdue University. He worked with Bruce
Rogers. (Bruce Rogers was at Purdue.) He gave
me his printing office hand press. His name was
[Mark H.] Liddell. He was interested in doing a
set of Shakespeare plays in the actual—each word
that Shakespeare used had its own dictionary
meaning of the time. So the pages were full of
notes .
He wrote a small book, which I printed,
called The Typography of Shakespere's Midsommer
Nightes Dreame. When I came to San Francisco I
had 100 copies. I sold it to John Howell for a
dollar a copy, but I didn't reprint anything on it.
Teiser: Do you have a copy left yourself now?
Grabhorn: No.
Teiser: Did you meet Bruce Rogers too, in Indianapolis?
Grabhorn: No, but I talked about him.
Teiser: He was a kind of ideal of yours, was he?
Grabhorn: Yes. He used to be what they call a chalk printer.
Teiser: Chalk printer?
Grabhorn: Chalk engraver on newspapers. In fact, I collected
a great many of his books. They're in the Max
Kuhl Collection, in the San Francisco Public
Library. I sold them to Albert Bender. Some of
his rarest books I had.
Teiser: Was this a collection you had started in Indianapolis?
11
Grabhorn: No, when I was here. I bought them one day at
Dawson's [in Los Angeles]. He had a whole col
lection and he didn't know what he had. He sold
them for fifty cents apiece.
Teiser: That was when, in the 'thirties?
Grabhorn: No, that must've been in the 'twenties.
Teiser: What was the location of the first shop that you
owned in Indianapolis, after your return from
Seattle?
Grabhorn: In a building owned by the father of a boy who
goes to the University of California, by the name
of Holliday^ I asked Mr. Hoi 1 i day*[l ater] if he
remembered me. He said he only knew that if I
was a printer I didn't pay my rent.
Teiser: Was that the Studio Press?
Grabhorn: No, it wasn't.
There were more deadbeats in that building
than in any United States penitentiary. [Laughter]
Underneath me was a lunch counter. I had an old
Colt's Armory press. The first job I started on,
I took two or three prints and the press fell apart
At lunch hour, another fellow and I sat down and
laughed--if it had gone down through to the pie
counter ....... [laughter]. The man I was printing
the job for came in the afternoon. When he saw
what had happened he said, "Put on your hat and
H o 11 1 d ay
12
Grabhorn: coat. We'll go to Chicago. I'll buy you a
new press." So we went to Chicago and we went around
to all the places that make trick novelty stuff
to be given away at carnivals, where you throw rings
and try to get something. You buy the stuff by the
barrel. You call it giving it away.
Teiser: Did you buy a press too?
Grabhorn: Yes. We bought a press. It was a very good press.
Teiser: What kind was it?
Grabhorn: Colt's Armory, a later model.
Teiser: And you took it back to Indianapolis?
Grabhorn: Yes. Then I printed for him until the press was
paid for. I printed all kinds of curious things,
like advertisements for what they call ski ball pool.
You put them at the edge of the pool table, cut holes,
put numbers on them. In fact I wrote the book of
rules for ski ball pool.
Teiser: Who was the man?
Grabhorn: I don't remember his name. He'd spend $50 to make
ten cents cheap. I had to do the whole complete
thing and ship the packages because the Internal
Revenue was after him. He'd collect the money and
throw the orders away. So constantly I had to com
plete the work and keep him out of jail.
Teiser: You had the Studio Press after that?
13
Grabhorn: Yes. I moved into a little cottage and took over
the press; called it the Studio Press. The
Studio Press is still running in Indianapolis. It's
one of the largest printing shops in Indianapolis.
Teiser: Did it come out of the press that you had?
Grabhorn: Yes. Mine was first. How that happened, I used
to do ad work for a big advertising firm in
Indianapolis called Seidner and Van Riper. I set
up ads for the Saturday Evening Post even then.
Teiser: What did they advertise?
Grabhorn: Kokomo Tire and Rubber Company. I set some of those
ads. I thought it was fun. I charged them $25
and they didn't pay me. I sent a bill. And every
month for twelve months they sent me $25. At the
end of the year they stopped sending it to me.
[Laughter]
Teiser: How did you happen to go from your first shop there
into the Studio Press?
Grabhorn: I don't know. But I learned one thing: you have
to call your place by a name, not by your own
name, like Grabhorn Press.
Teiser: Had the Studio Press been established before you
went there?
Grabhorn: No.
Teiser: You took your press from over the lunch room and
went there?
14
>
Grabhorn: Yes. From the Holliday building.
Teiser: So you'd first run a shop in Seattle briefly, then
in the Holliday building in Indianapolis, then the
Studio Press in Indianapolis, and then you came out
to San Francisco?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Early Influences
[Edwin Grabhorn first went to Indianapolis when
he was ten, to visit his aunt.]
Grabhorn: She was a very religious woman. It was a hot
summer and I said, "Gee whiz, Aunt Evie, have you
got anything to read around here?"
She said, "Here's the Bible. Read that." And I
read the Bible until I got into all the begats.
The begats floored me. [Laughter]
Teiser: It was after that that you read all of Shakespeare?
Grabhorn : Yes .
Teiser: Did you really read the whole collected works?
Grabhorn: I not only read it, I could recite it.
Teiser: Was the aunt you spoke of, who gave you the Bible
to read, the wife of the printer?
Grabhorn: No. She was the wife of a plumber. My mother's
sister.
Teiser: Was your father a craftsman?
15
Grabhorn: My father*had so many children that were craftsmen
that I was the laughable one of the family. They
never even thought I could do anything. I was so
useless in that family. I have a brother who was
a craftsman, plumber. He made a little steam engine
that ran, just a tiny one.
Teiser: When he was a kid?
Grabhorn: Yes .
Teiser: And all you were doing was sitting around reading
books, uselessly?
Grabhorn: Yes. My mother used to beat me for reading so much.
She had a brother who read nickel novels all his
life, and she thought it made you lazy to read all
the time.
My brother and I, during spring vacations, would
work on the farms planting onions. My brother was so
good that they wouldn't hire me. And I fixed it so
they couldn't hire him unless they hired me. That's
how we worked all the time.
Teiser: This was the brother who became a plumber?
Grabhorn: No, this was another brother. I had five brothers.
Teiser: What were their names?
Grabhorn: He was named Walter. The third one was named Lewis,
and then down to Kenneth. My mother used to, when
she'd want to call us, start with the whole family
and name them down to the one she wanted, then
she would stop: "Edwin, Walter, Lewis, Kenneth,
Henry Grabhorn
16
Grabhorn: come here!" [Laughter]
Teiser: Are you the oldest?
Grabhorn: Yes. Two [relatives] were out here a week ago
and called on us. They are cousins, very young,
and both lieutenants in the United States Army.
They graduated from West Point and were on the way
to the Middle East.
Teiser: What did your father do?
Grabhorn: He was a foreman in a furniture factory. He told
me when I collected American furniture that I was
crazy: it has so many fakes. He said, "I can
make any kind of a worm hole." [Laughter]
Teiser: Did you start collecting books at all when you
were in Indianapolis?
Grabhorn: Yes. I always collected books.
Teiser: What made you interested in books?
Grabhorn: Well, I used to go to the public library, and I
got interested in title pages. I would take down
the books and look at the title page of every book
in the public library until they stopped me, be
cause I wasn't putting them back right. [Laughter]
Teiser: You were probably the only young fellow who ever
was interested in title pages in that library.
[Laughter]
17
Grabhorn: I'd look and see if I could find any good ones.
Teiser: Did you find many?
Grabhorn: Not many.
Teiser: Were your parents interested in reading, or anyone
in your family?
Grabhorn: My mother used to beat me for reading so much.
She thought it was a form of laziness.
Teiser: So you really started reading young?
Grabhorn: Yes. I used to take nickel novels to school and
put them in the geography and open the geography
and read them. "Bang! And another redskin bit the
dust."
Teiser: You said you worked for a print shop in French....?
Grabhorn: Lick Springs.
Teiser: French Lick Springs. Was that before you went to
work for your uncle?
Grabhorn: No, it was after. I worked for a man by the name
of Tom Taggart, who owned the hotel.
Teiser: What did you do?
Grabhorn: Worked in the printing office. They got out an
advertisement for Pluto Water, a red devil standing
up pointing to a bottle.
Teiser: Did you then print that?
Grabhorn: Yes. We had a foreman there; he had to get 250,000
letterheads in four colors. They went wrong, the
colors, and he had to print a thousand good ones
18
Grabhorn: over to show the management they were all right.
Teiser: Did you work on that?
Grabhorn: A little bit.
Teiser: Were you operating a press then?
Grabhorn: Yes. A Colt's Armory press.
Teiser: When did you learn to run a press?
Grabhorn: When I worked for my uncle.
Teiser: You learned both typesetting and presswork then?
Grabhorn: Yes. He had what they call a Nonpareil press.
Teiser: Was that powered or foot powered?
Grabhorn: It was powered. His gauge pins, he used bent pins,
paper pins, he would bend them three or four ways
and stick them in the tympan so a little part stood
up.
Teiser: What for?
Grabhorn: He would put the paper on them.
Teiser: Oh, use them as a guide for the paper?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: Did he invent that?
Grabhorn: Yes. He invented anything cheap. He would spend
all his time untying string. He had a large ball
of used string. I learned then that some of those
ways to save money didn't save money.
Teiser: You never were as interested in saving money as in
doing things, were you?
Grabhorn: No. My uncle changed me, because people would come
19
Grabhorn: in and want to use the paper cutter and cut off the
top part with the printing. It was of no use any
more. They asked him how much they owed him for
the use of the paper cutter. He'd look at the pile
of paper, spit tobacco juice on the floor and say,
"Well, about five cents." And I felt so humiliated
I swore if I could never charge more than five cents
I wouldn't charge anything for any work.
Teiser: How old were you when you went to work for him?
About thirteen did you say?
Grabhorn: Thirteen, yes.
Teiser: Had you been to high school then?
Grabhorn: No, I never went to high school.
Teiser: Just grammar school?
Grabhorn: Yes. Eighth grade.
Teiser: Where did you go to grammar school?
Grabhorn: Number 33 in Indianapolis.
Tieser: Oh, your family had moved to Indianapolis by then?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: Was your family pushing you to work?
Grabhorn: No. I went to work because I didn't like school.
I remember the teacher wrote a note to my family
that I was too bright to quit school. I should
keep it up.
Teiser: But you didn't want to?
Grabhorn: No, I didn't want to.
20
Teiser: Were you reading a lot then?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: How did you happen to work for your uncle?
Grabhorn: He offered me a job. His shop was in a basement.
I remember reading a short skit. "The devil was
looking out of the window. In fact this was not
the common enemy of man, but a small imp commonly
known as a printer's devil." [Laughter]
To San Francisco
Teiser: When did you come to San Francisco?
Grabhorn: 1919. I came on Christmas day. It was raining
and I thought I'd made a poor choice. I stopped
off first in Los Angeles. There was a bunch of men
in Los Angeles that wanted me to start there. They
offered to build me a building and give me a fee
if I started in Los Angeles.
Teiser: How did they know you?
Grabhorn: I don't know. They were a group of well-known men
there.
Teiser: You were known from your Studio Press?
Grabhorn: Yes. They had a convention out here [in San
Francisco] and some men from Seidner and Van Riper
advertising agency came out here and brought some
of my printing with them. They came back and told
me there was no chance for me. There was a man in
21
Grabhorn: San Francisco they were crazy about called John
Henry Nash. They thought he was a big blowhard.
Teiser: When Haywood Hunt wrote you about San Francisco,
did you decide to come here on the basis of what he
told you about it?
Grabhorn: Yes. He sent me some of Nash's printing.
Teiser: You thought if there was room for Nash there was
room for you, or what?
Grabhorn: Well, I knew one thing: Nash used rules for
decorations, and a good rule in printing was no
rule. In those days they printed rules and panels
and put the printing in the rules. He was known as
a whiz at mitering corners.
Teiser: Is that hard to do, to miter a corner?
Grabhorn: Well, it is; you've got to be careful.
Teiser: So you decided against Los Angeles after all?
Grabhorn: I did, because it was the day before Christmas and
it was a warm, beautiful day and I thought you
couldn't do any work printing in a warm country
unless you were a millionaire and you could loaf.
It was not good for printing like San Francisco
was .
Teiser: You had never been in San Francisco before?
Grabhorn: No.
Teiser: You came up on the train, did you?
Grabhorn: Yes. It was raining. But that was all right.
22
Teiser: Where did you go to stay?
Grabhorn: I don't remember. I must've gone someplace.
Teiser: Was your brother Bob with you?
Grabhorn: Yes. You see, we'd sent our printing material
from Indianapolis to Los Angeles. We didn't have
anything 'til finally it came by freight to San
Franci sco .
Teiser: Did you work for a brief time in a print shop here
before you established your own press?
Grabhorn: Yes I did. I was a union printer and I worked for
a little printing office--! forget the name—on
California Street and Kearny. It was a little base
ment shop. And I didn't say anything to the man,
just applied for a job as a printer. He would
bring me envelope corners to set up and tell me
the sizes, the types, et cetera, and I listened to
him and said nothing. One day the printing magazine,
Pacific Printer, came out and told about me being
there and showed samples of some of the work I'd
done in Indianapolis. This printer came in and
said, "Well, we got an artist working here!"
[Laughter] So I went out to lunch and never came
back*
I'll tell you why I came to California. Print
ing depends on the climate. For instance, if you
print something on wet paper and the weather is dry,
the paper dries while youV-e printing and curls up.
*The printer is said to have been Chris Beran. Ruth
23
Grabhorn: It doesn't look the same. You've got to keep it
uniformly damp. And the California weather, the
damp air, keeps the paper in the correct condition
for printing. For instance, if you take a piece
of paper, a hard hand-made paper that's half-way
damp, it requires about one-quarter the quantity
of ink to be black than if it's dry. If it's dry,
it's like printing on a piece of tin, the paper is
so hard and the ink won't take on it. We printed
Leaves of Grass, 400 copies, 400 folio pages and
every sheet of paper was dampened. And every sheet
had to be kept at a uniform dampness, so I built a
cupboard and lined it with an old blanket and kept
the water in it. Every day I had to dampen a
thousand sheets of paper to print the next day.
There were 450 copies of the Leaves of Grass.
Every day I dampened nine hundred sheets of paper
and it would be right for printing by the next morn
ing, not too wet. If the paper was too wet it would
become too soft and the ink, being very stiff, would
pull it into the rollers. Do you see?
Teiser: Yes.
Grabhorn: The life is taken out of the paper with the damp.
I think that Leaves of Grass is the most perfect
book we ever printed. Of the 450 copies there
weren't 25 copies destroyed.
24
Tenser: You must've worked terribly carefully all through
it.
Grabhorn: Yes. And kept the ink even. I bought some old
woodcut ink from an old company, that had been
made forty years earlier. You couldn't put a knife
down into it, it was so hard. I was going to put in
the colophon in the book: "450 copies printed and
the press destroyed." [Laughter]
Teiser: How did you work the ink then, if it was that dry?
Grabhorn: Oh, with a knife, back and forth. I usually used a
hammer on a piece of marble and hammered it out.
Teiser: Did it have different kinds of pigments than were
available later? Was that why you got the old ink?
Grabhorn: No, no. It was all carbon black.
Teiser: Why did you get the old ink then, instead of getting
what was available?
Grabhorn: Because it had been aged.
Teiser: Is that important?
Grabhorn: That was important to me. I was kind of lucky to
find the ink.
Teiser: Was that printed on a Colt's Armory?
Grabhorn : Yes .
Teiser: When you came to San Francisco, what equipment did
you have f i rst?
Grabhorn: I had the Colt's Armory press. And Albert Bender...
[pause]
25
Teiser: What did Albert Bender do?
Grabhorn: He was a patron.
Teiser: Did he help you?
Grabhorn: Yes. He would loan me money and then make me
sign a note for it. I don't think he charged me
interest. He bought some of the books. Usually
he'd buy ten or twelve and give them away.
Teiser: Did he pay cash?
Grabhorn: In advance. He lent me up to $300, took a note
for it.
Teiser: Did you bring type from Indianapolis to San Fran
cisco?
Grabhorn: Yes. I brought type and I brought a small Colt's
Armory press, ten by fifteen inches.
Teiser: What kind of type did you bring?
Grabhorn: Some Goudy type. And I also brought some Caslon.
The man who gave me the hand press gave me the
type.
Teiser: You had done well enough in Indianapolis then, to
come out here?
Grabhorn: I set up advertisements in those days. When I came
out here, I set up all the ads for H. K. McCann
Company, and I made $40,000 a year setting ads. I
quit because you had nothing to show for it at the
end of the year, except money. I decided I'd rather
print a book.
26
Teiser: It must have been hard to do.
Grabhorn: No, because money as money never interested me.
Anecdotes of the San Francisco Printing World
Teiser: You mentioned that you were a member of the union.
Where did you join the union?
Grabhorn: Indianapolis, before I came out here.
Teiser: Which Union was it?
Grabhorn: Typographical union.
Teiser: Were you ever a member of the pressman's union?
Grabhorn: No.
Teiser: But you did run a press?
Grabhorn: Yes, but in order to get a label I had to employ
a union pressman and a union printer.
Teiser: But you didn't later, here at the Grabhorn Press,
did you?
Grabhorn: No. I didn't because the secretary of the union
came up to call on me. And I had framed the title
of a Kelmscott book called Reynard The Foxe. This
fox was spelled f-o-x-e. Morris had made it Reynard
the Foxe. He read it in my shop, Reynard the
"Foxee." He read the Kelmscott page and thought they'd
made a mistake by putting an E on the end of fox.
I thought, "If he's that ignorant, no use for me to
join the union."
Teiser: So you gave that up.
27
Grabhorn: I gave that up. That was so dumb. [Laughter]
The funniest thing that ever happened to me:
one day I bought a book. It was a bunch of essays
written by an Englishman, published about 1890. It
was the essays of Giacomo Leopardi , who was a very
famous Italian, lived about 1800, died in 1833.
These were his essays, written originally in
Italian and translated into English. And there
was one essay I liked very well. It was for the
New Year, called "A Dialogue Between an Almanac
Seller and a Passer-by." I reprinted this for a
Christmas card. It was about eight or ten pages
long. I sent one to a friend of mine who was
editor of the Publisher's Weekly, a man by the
name of Meltzer. And he wrote a criticism of it.
I had just come to California, and somehow they
reviewed it in Publisher's Weekly. The next thing
you know — there was a librarian for the State of
California in Sacramento, called Milton Ferguson, a
very nice fellow. The State Library of California
wrote to me--to Giacomo Leopardi. They were col
lecting California authors, and he would be person
ally thanked if he would send them one of the
Dialogues; and by the way, they'd be happy if he
autographed it. [Laughter] At that time there
was a reporter on the Hearst newspapers, and when
28
Grabhorn: I showed him all this correspondence, he wanted
me to autograph a copy and send it to the State
Library. I said, "No, I'm not ready to leave yet."
He meant he would go and discover the Giacomo
Leopardi autograph. [Laughter] And I thought I
would get run out of the state if I did that, so
I wouldn't do it. But I thought it was the greatest
joke that ever happened.
It reminds me of a dinner John Henry Nash
gave one time. There was a woman who came here to
visit Nash. She was the wife of a very famous
printer. Her name was Anne Cobden-Sanderson . She
was the wife of Cobden-Sanderson in England.
And she came to California. A man who was editor
of a New York magazine told me she was coming to
San Francisco and he wanted to give her a luncheon.
"And by the way," he wrote at the bottom, "I must
warn you, she's a vegetarian." One day I was called
up by John Henry Nash. He said, "Listen Ed, will
you come to lunch? Anne Cobden-Sanderson is going
to be there today." And I thought, "Oh my God,
and I was asked to give her a luncheon." So I went
down to Nash's office. He had a great big table
set up by a caterer. At every other plate was a
bottle of wine and a large plate of salami and meat.
And at the head of the table was an already-prepared
29
Grabhorn: turkey. Nash and I went back in the composing
room. And I said, "By the way, John Henry, I
don't want to worry you, but did you know that
Anne Cobden-Sanderson was a vegetarian?" He
said, "Oh, no. It's too late to do anything
about it now. But she eats turkey, doesn't she?
[1 aughter]
Teiser: That's a wonderful Nash story.
Grabhorn: He was a bicycle rider.
Teiser: He was?
Grabhorn: Yes, a champion bicycle rider in Canada.
I think the funniest thing was a party the
printers gave Nash when he was made M. A. of Mills
College. Of course, me and Bob were invited. I
sat there, and I never have laughed so much in my
life, because here was a great big table full of
drunken printers. You know how they would be.
At the head of the table sat Nash, and an adver
tising man, a fellow by the name of Walter Gardner.
He had written Nash's prepared speech. They thought
it was a great thing for San Francisco: a printer
had been made an M. A. of Mills College. And
Gardner got up and started to talk, what the initials
M. A. meant. He had all kinds of definitions for
M. A. and a platemaker got mad. He claimed he should
have gotten the degree because he made the plates
for Nash, who got the credit. This story is a little
30
Grabhorn: rough. This man [Gardner] got up and said,
"Gentlemen, a lot of you don't know what M. A. means.
But I'll tell you. It means Mechanical Arrangement."
And he went around through different things the
initials M. A. stand for. And finally he said, "But
I want to tell you, M. A. means " and a drunken
printer hollered, "My ass." And the meeting broke
up. So I was telling Albert Bender about it. He
said, "I wish I had known. I would have liked to
have had Aurelia Henry Reinhardt there." [Laughter]
She would have been a fine one.
Teiser: Nash printed for her, didn't he?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: But then didn't you later print things for her,
too?
Grabhorn: Yes. She and I got into a fight. She wanted to
build a new building at Mills College. And she
wanted me to do a piece of printing they'd charge
fifty cents for, to go toward the building of the
new building. I wouldn't do it. I said I couldn't
make them any piece of printing that would look like
fifty cents. [Laughter]
She was a funny sort of a woman. She was
very beautiful and persuasive. She could probably
get anything she wanted, especially from poor
Bender. He was susceptible.
31
Teiser: Bender was susceptible to a lot of things, wasn't
he?
Grabhorn: Yes. He was crazy about a cousin called Anne
Bremer, who was the artist. In fact, I think he
was in love with her, according to Maynard Dixon.
But all artists, you know, belittle other artists.
Teiser: Did you know Miss Rosalind Keep's little press at
Mills College.
Grabhorn: Yes. She employed a man who used to work for me.
Teiser: Who was that?
Grabhorn: Kennedy, Alfred Kennedy. He was a very nice boy.
Teiser: Did she do very good work?
Grabhorn: No, she didn't. Alfred Kennedy worked for me
the book we did for the Book Club of California,
the Columbus letter*--i t ' s got Alfred's name in it.
It says "Type set by Alfred Kennedy."
Teiser: Was he with you for a long time?
Grabhorn: Yes. We started in business at 47 Kearny Street,
on the fourth floor. Alfred came over then and
worked for me. He set type on the first book we
did for the Book Club [of California], called
The Gracious Visitation , by [Emma] Frances Dawson.
**
The Letter of Christopher Columbus, 1924
**
1921
32
Grabhorn: Yes. That was the first book we printed in
California. The next book was The Letters of Oscar
Veil. He wasn't W-i-1-d-e-; he was W-e-i-1.
Teiser: Was Alfred Kennedy still working for you then?
Grabhorn: Yes. Then when we moved up to 526 Powell Street,
Alfred set the type on the Columbus letter, which
we printed for the Book Club. So he worked for me
a long time through the years. He had three or
four brothers. Their father was a preacher, who
started a printing office in Oakland, and they
weren't doing very good work, you know. Alfred was
what you might call a compositor with ideals.
Teiser: You had a number of other people working for
you, didn't you, from time to time?
Grabhorn: Well, they'd come around. I didn't employ many.
They would help out, set type and do things.
Teiser: Was much of the work that you printed hand set?
Grabhorn: Yes. I had a young fellow from Germany who came.
His uncle ran a type foundry. He came over and
worked for quite a long time.
Teiser: Was he a good typesetter?
Grabhorn: Oh, very good, very meticulous, you know.
Teiser: And Bob set type too?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: And you set some type?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: But, also, you did some of the press work?
33
Grabhorn: I did most of the presswork.
Teiser: But you also employed some pressmen?
Grabhorn: Yes, I did for a long time. One was a drunkard.
He would work one week and be off six weeks.
Teiser: What was his name? Was that the one that David
Magee told a story about--his being gone six weeks
*
for a piece of chalk?
Grabhorn: Yes. He'd say to me, "Ed, we're out of French
chalk. Can I go get some?" His name was Tom
Hewitt. And then he'd come back about six weeks
later. "Where'd you go for that French chalk,
Tom? Paris?"
Teiser: So you ran the press while he was off?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: Drunkenness was a printer's occupational disease,
wasn't it? Pretty prevalent among printers?
Grabhorn: It was prevalent among all Americans.
Teiser: Was it?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: People in other occupations as much as printers,
do you think?
Grabhorn: Oh, yes. But especially house painters.
p. ix, "Two Gentlemen from Indiana," in Catalogue
of Some Five Hundred Examples of the Printing of
Edwin & Robert Grabhorn [1961]
34
Teiser: I wonder why.
Grabhorn: Well, you didn't have automobiles or radios; you
didn't have diversion. What else was there to do
but get drunk? You know you could take a dollar
and have the most marvelous drunk. On Saturday
night a glass of beer was five cents. They'd give
a free lunch, like oyster stew. Why go home to the
same old meal when you could get something differ
ent at the saloons? They made a practice of serv
ing good meals for five cents. In fact, when I
worked as a printer I used to go to the saloon for
lunch because lunch was only ten cents. I never
ordered beer; I never liked beer. But I ordered
a glass of pop--soda water—and it would be ten
cents. I'd get a free lunch with it.
Teiser: Wasn't your first shop in San Francisco on Kearny
Street, above the candy shop?
Grabhorn: Yes, the Orange Blossom candy store. It was a
large firm during the fair. The fair was 1915.
This was only four years after. It went into
receivership. A friend of mine by the name of
Herbert Rothschild became the receiver. He was
also receiver for moving picture houses, the Calif
ornia and the Granada.
Teiser: So he rented you the space?
Grabhorn: No. I didn't know him then.
Teiser: You came to know him?
35
Grabhorn: Yes. I printed books for him, Christmas books.
Those days were quite different from now. There
used to be a bunch of us that would get together in
Jack Newbegin's book store. Herbert Rothschild
would come there; Jim Tufts, who was editor of the
Chronicle, would be there. And we'd talk. One
time Tufts said to Herbert Rothschild, "Listen,
Herbert, why don't you get out a new book. I have
three stories of Bret Harte's. They were all
written together but never published together,
and they should go into one book."
Rothschild said, "Is it very long?" And he said,
"No, only about twelve pages." "Well," he said,
"Ed, make me a Christmas book of it, will you?
And Jim, you edit it."
Well, it was a book of two hundred pages. So
he brought me the copy and he was to read proof.
Of course, we didn't have enough type to set it
all up, and he'd come very occasionally and read
the proof.
Teiser: Did you have to set part of it and distribute the
type?
Grabhorn: Yes, and print it. So I did that, starting in
about August. And I printed on it until Christmas
time. And we finished it on Christmas Eve. So I
had it bound in one night by a binder, a hundred
copies, and sent it to Rothschild. Of course, he
36
Grabhorn: [Tufts] gave Rothschild the idea it would be a very
small book. Rothschild was a big sport, "I don't
care what it costs, go ahead and do it."
Teiser: What was the title of it?
Grabhorn: I forget.
Teiser: About when was that?
Grabhorn: I suppose about 1925. Sometimes we worked on it
until ten or twelve o'clock at night. And I sent
the hundred books out to Rothschild on the after
noon of Christmas Eve. He called me up. I was
going to charge him $500 for the work, although
it was worth a lot more money than that. And he
called me up on Christmas Eve and said, "The books
just came to me. Now send out another wagon and
take them back." I was going to write the bill for
$600, so I added $600 more to it when he called up
and said, "Send out another wagon." I charged him
$1200 or $1500 which wasn't quite enough.
Teiser: He actually refused them?
Grabhorn: Yes, because he didn't get them in time to send
them out for Christmas.
Teiser: What did you finally do with them?
Grabhorn: I sent them out to him and he kept them all. He
gave them away casually, I guess.
Teiser: Are there any around?
Grabhorn: No.
Teiser: Is he still alive?
37
Grabhorn: No, he died some years ago.
Teiser: Did he pay you?
Grabhorn: Yes, he eventually paid me.
Teiser: Who was doing your bookbinding at that time?
Grabhorn: I employed a woman by the name of Hazel Dreis.
Hazel Dreis was a great friend of a friend of mine,
Albert Elkus. We had an apartment together. Albert
sent Hazel (he was in love with her) to England to
learn about bookbinding. She came back after three
weeks and knew all about bookbinding, knew how to
tear a book apart but not how to put it back together
again, you know. Being that Albert thought she was
a genius, I had to support her.
Teiser: She eventually became a very fine bookbinder,
didn't she?
Grabhorn: No, she never was. She worked for me for a long
time, binding Leaves of Grass.
Teiser: Did she bind that?
Grabhorn: Yes. But I had to go over every copy with my own
binder because she broke the backs of the books.
Do you know what breaking the back of a book is?
You open it in the center and put the two parts
together then put it back and look at it, and you
see a crack right down the middle.
Teiser: What binder went over them with you then?
Grabhorn: A man who worked for me by the name of William
38
Grabhorn: Wheeler. She made me a price of $900 for the books.
Then I bought the leather and got the boards all
ready. Then I had a bookbinder working for me;
I had him go over every book and fix it up.
Teiser: Bill Wheeler?
Grabhorn: Yes. She said she'd bind them for $900. I said
that was all right, I wouldn't hold her to it too
closely. She'd send down every week and get $250.
One time she sent down for a check, and I said,
"I won't pay you any more money until I look up and
see how much I've paid you." I looked, and I'd
already paid her $1300. So she turned around, when
I wouldn't pay her any more, and sued me for $3000
more. Herbert Rothschild paid the bill. He wouldn't
let it come to court. He said, "When a woman sues
a man, the man has to pay-." [Laughter]
Presses. Types and Other Considerations
Teiser: Why did you use the Colt's Armory press always?
Why did you favor that press?
Grabhorn: Because I had it.
Teiser: No, but you got new ones.
Grabhorn: I never bought a new press in my life. They were
all second hand.
Teiser: But really, how did you happen to stick with the
Colt's Armory?
39
Grabhorn: Because you can get a heavier impression on that
type form. And, listen, printing on hand-made
paper, a cylinder press has a rolled impression;
and a rolled impression puts more strength on the
least resistant. And when you set up a line of type
all the ascending or descending letters—all the
p's and q's, you know, in the line — are punched —
hit harder — by a rolling impression, so they get
blacker. But when it's solid — the type page is
solid— when an impression hits it, it makes what
you call a cleaner impression on the type, and a
more even impression. So the 1's and the p's and
q's don't punch through the paper because that part
that has a little resistance with a strong impression
prints very strong.
Teiser: That explains why you used the Colt's Armory, and
still do.
Grabhorn: All type that is very good, designed type, is wh.at
they call script line. That means that the ascend
ing letters and descending letters are all sort of —
let us say an a takes up one-third of the body
of the type and a p and a q would take up one-
third. That means the other two-thirds of body is
used for ascending letters. They don't require as
much impression to make them show as it would if
they were all equal, if the whole face was filled up,
40
Grabhorn: like, say, a capital W, where the whole body is
type. But when the ascending letters only take up
one-third of the body of the type, you don't have
to hit them as hard as you have to hit an m or
an n or a vowel .
Teiser: Because they take up more space?
Grabhorn: Yes. And therefore they resist the impression more
than a lighter form of the type. You're not record
ing what I'm sayi ng?
Tei ser : Yes , I am.
Grabhorn: Well, that is the reason: the more resistance there
is to a type form on the page you're printing, the
more pressure you have to put on that type form to
make it look legible. Now on a cylinder press the
paper is put on a roller, and when you roll some
thing over it, it hits hardest where it first strikes,
when it starts to roll. So your impression is not
what you call even, as it is on a flatbed press
where the type comes smack up against the paper, you
know.
Teiser: And the Colt's Armory was the only flatbed press...
Grabhorn: It was the only flatbed press that I could get a
strong enough impression on.
Teiser: Were there any other flatbed presses still being
made?
Grabhorn: Yes, but their arms were weak. I mean by the arm
41
Grabhorn: these two iron bars that control what you call
the platen. The platen is what you put the paper
on. And those arms would break in two where the
impression resistance was very strong. The axis
is stronger on a Colt's Armory press, and you don't
have that breakage, even on a heavy impression.
Teiser: You, habitually, in your books, have made a heavy
impression, have you not?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: So that it even sometimes showed through a little?
Grabhorn: The reason for that is that when you print, your
type should become a part of your paper. And to
have that heavy impression you force your type into
the paper so you can't take a razor blade and scrape
the printing off the page, you know. You'd have to
split the paper.
Teiser: The furthest away from that is offset, isn't it?
Grabhorn: Yes, and lithography, which just lays the ink on
the surface of the paper. When your type becomes
a part of the paper you have durability. That's
the reason a Gutenberg Bible is more beautiful today
than when it was printed, because the quality of the
black ink was so good that it didn't become pale
with the years.
Teiser: You have been very critical about your inks too,
have you not?
42
Grabhorn: Oh, yes. It should all be carbon black without
shine. A page of type that shines--it shines on
smooth paper that is used to print half-tones on.
It's very hard to read when the type shines; it's
hard on the eyes .
Teiser: What kind of types have you favored?
Grabhorn: I've favored type that doesn't have excessive thicks
and thins in its design — that is, doesn't pop.
Teiser: And there is a family of types, generally
Grabhorn: Yes, there are two kinds of type. The dividing
line was about the year 1800, when the map makers
began making descriptions on maps in a pen letter
that had excessive thickness and thinness, and copper
plate--when they print by what's called copper plate
method, they make the down strokes unusually heavy
and the curve strokes excessively light. When you
print on a very smooth paper, which shines, it's
rather hard to read, such as magazines with a lot
of pictures in.
Teiser: So the kind of types that you have used
Grabhorn: have been types that you could press into the
paper and they become a part of the paper.
Teiser: That don't have these very light strokes?
Grabhorn: Yes. In the making of letters, the first letters
were all made with what they called quill pen-
that is the feathers were used to make the letters
43
Grabhorn: so you got a kind of uneven stroke all the way
through. Then when they made pens with steel
points, you got very fine lines. The year 1800
was the dividing line for the kind of pen that was
used to make type. All the early types were made
copies of the quill pen, not the way the steel pen
made it. The steel pen was used for copper plate
engravings more than quill.
Teiser: The first type that you bought was in what class?
Grabhorn: The first type was made by Goudy. It was a quill-
pen design. Goudy was not a type designer. He
was a bookkeeper, and he designed an alphabet of
type as an amusement and sent it to a typefounders,
and they bought it from him. That's how he became
a type designer.
Teiser: What type of his was it that you bought first?
Grabhorn: Well, his best type, his Kennerley. The form was
taken from the stone inscriptions of the early
I tal i ans .
Teiser: Then what was the Franciscan type that you had as
your own type?
Grabhorn: Well, it was what is known as a half-Gothic. It
wasn't a pure Gothic type. Gothic types are more
decorated than other types, and they also are heavier
I've always liked the Gothics. People say they
can't read them. It's ridiculous. They can't read
44
Grabhorn: them because they're unfamiliar with them. The
Germans read everything in Gothic and can read it
rapidly too .
Teiser: How did you happen to get the Franciscan type?
Grabhorn: It was a design that Goudy made, and they never
accepted it.
Teiser: Who was it made for originally?
Grabhorn: I don't know. He never told me. I only paid him
$700 for both the type design and the matrix from
which to cast it. I think American typefounders
now don't use those methods of making types. They
make electrotypes. In other words, the type is
drawn about a foot high and reduced down to a very
fine line. And then they copy that with steel
punches. There are very few punch cutters left any
more.
Teiser: Do I remember that the matrices of the Franciscan
type were lost?
Grabhorn: Yes. They were lost when we moved from one place
to another.
Teiser: But you still have a good deal of that type?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: So you can still print with it?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: Where did you have it cast?
Grabhorn: I had the Monotype Company cast it.
45
Tei ser : Right here?
Grabhorn: Right here in San Francisco.
Teiser: That was Carroll Harris?
Grabhorn: Carroll Harris, yes.
Teiser: Did he*set a good deal of type for you from
time to time?
Grabhorn: Not very much, because his machine was limited.
He couldn't set 18 point as body type--12 and 14.
Franciscan is 18 point. He couldn't set that by
machine; he didnt have the equipment to set 18 point
He didn't then. They might have some 18 point now.
He can cast, though, any size type.
Teiser: Then you hand-set it?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: Did you hand-set the body text of many books?
Grabhorn: Yes, of many. It was much cheaper than machine.
For instance, we set Two years Before the Mast
by hand.
Teiser: Didn't it take up a tremendous amount of space?
Grabhorn: We got about 1200, 1500 pounds of type. As long
as you have enough to set up eight pages, you can
print them and then throw the type in and reset it.
Teiser: You distributed as you went?
Grabhorn: Yes, you can do that.
Teiser: You proof read carefully, then, as you go?
Grabhorn: You proof read, but you can't be too careful. I
i.e. his firm, MacKenzie and Harris
Left to Right: Robert Grabhorn, Edwin Grabhorn, Sherwood Grover.
Grabhorn Press, 1959. Reproduction rights reserved by Ruth
Teiser and Catherine Harroun.
46
Grabhorn: remember one time—the funniest thing I ever did
in my life — I used to have Francis Farquhar read
a lot of proof. Then I set up a colophon. In it
I thanked Francis Farquhar and I misspelled his
name in it. [Laughter] To misspell anybody's
name! I've been told that every time a man was
sentenced to be executed at San Quentin, what would
make him madder than anything else was if the news
papers misspelled his name. I thought it was a
funny thing: I thanked Francis for reading the
proofs and spelled his name Farqhuar. It's quhar.
When I looked at it, I realized I had made a mis
take, but I didn't have enough paper to reprint it.
So I said it had to go. And I thought it was so
funny, but Francis never thought so.
Teiser: Who did all this hand composition?
Grabhorn: I had a boy working for me by the name of William
Grover and his wife, Katharine. They set the type
for Two Years Before the Mast.
Teiser: Did Bob Grabhorn set some of it, too?
Grabhorn: Well, we called in everybody to fill in where it
was necessary, even in binding. Everybody had
to work.
Teiser: Did you set some of the type yourself?
Grabhorn: I never set too much type. I make too many mistakes
Teiser: Did you teach Bob Grabhorn to set type, or did he
learn from someone else?
47
Grabhorn: No, he always worked here and set the type. I
never had the patience to set straight matter. You
take a book like Two Years Before The Mast, that
was first printed in a library that Harper's did,
Harper's Library. They'd set up one of these books
and print it every day. You can imagine how fast
they did it.
Teiser: Setting them up on machines?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: How long was it in your shop?
Grabhorn: It was in the shop, I guess, six months.
Teiser: Did Bill Wheeler bind it then?
Grabhorn: Yes. I never liked too much of Bill Wheeler's
binding. He was raised in a basement, you know,
and his binding was neat. He was a neat, clean
binder, but he was quick-minded. His work was too
fast. And about binding, you have to be awfully
careful, because the boards just curl up. People
don't know how to take good care of a book. They'll
buy the expensive book and put it on the dining
room table where the sun shines on it. And the sun
will warp anything, you know.
Teiser: Who did most of your binding?
Grabhorn: Bill Wheeler did most of it.
Teiser: Were there any binders that you considered very good?
Grabhorn: Yes. I had Otis Oldfield bind a couple of books for
48
Grabhorn: me. We had no equipment. Instead of using boards,
he pasted sheets together until it was thick enough.
Teiser: Did it work out all right?
Grabhorn: Not too well. He did a book for me, I still have
it at home, a large folio. Bound it in pigskin,
which is hard to bind in.
Teiser: Did he ever do any editions?
Grabhorn: No, he didn't do any editions.
Teiser: Did you send some books out to the trade binderies?
Grabhorn: Not many; I couldn't trust them. They were too bad,
too expensive. They just did commercial binding
that they slopped through, you know.
Especially, a person never ought to take a book
and lay it by a window where the sun shines on it.
Now, for instance, if you bind in vellum--you could
take a piece of vellum, wet it, tie it around your
neck, and it'd cut your head off when it shrinks.
It's very tough stuff.
Teiser: What kind of papers did you buy?
Grabhorn: Usually hand-made papers.
Teiser: Where can you get them?
Grabhorn: Europe. They don't make them much any more. For
Leaves of Grass .1 bought what they call unbleached
Arnold. But I wet every sheet of that paper to
print i t ; it was so hard.
49
Teiser: You must have spent a lot on paper. Hand-made
paper is not inexpensive, is it?
Grabhorn: I spent about $2000 on the paper for Leaves of
Grass .
Teiser: Did you order it through American agents?
Grabhorn: No. I needed 2000 pounds, and they were going to
put my watermark in free of charge. They wanted
a dollar a pound. Then I found out that I could
order direct, so I went down and ordered direct.
It cost about $1100. That was Zellerbach Paper
which was going to charge me $2000--$900 profit to
them for buying the paper. I couldn't afford that.
Teiser: Who did you buy it from then?
Grabhorn: Arnold Company, in England.
Teiser: Did you ever have anything bound in England?
Grabhorn: No. ..yes, I had one book bound in England, for
President Hoover, a special book, one volume. It's
down at the Bohemian Club. I paid $300 for that
binding. It consists of manuscripts of all his
speeches at the [Bohemian] Grove. I had them
mounted into the book.
Teiser: Actual manuscripts?
Grabhorn: Actual manuscripts.
Teiser: But you set the title page?
Grabhorn: Yes. And I set the pages they went in. They're on
all kinds of paper and cardboard, little scraps of
paper.
50
Teiser: I was just thinking about the time scheme. As I
remember, your tendency was never to deliver a book
on time. [Laughter]
Grabhorn: You know, that reminds me. I had a date with
Albert Bender, and he bought me a watch and gave it
to me, a little watch, about a $25 watch. And
three times I made a date and I never kept it. One
day I went down, and he said, "Well, the mistake
I made was to buy you a $25 watch. If I had all
the money in the world, I'd buy you the best watch
in the worl d. "
And I said, "If I had all the money in the
world, I'd destroy it." [Laughter] I felt like
Whistler. Somebody said, "Where were you at 7
o'clock last night?" And he said, "I've never been
anyplace in the world at 7 o'clock." [Laughter]
Teiser: The people you have always printed for always knew
that they were not going to get their books on
time, haven ' t they?
Grabhorn: I don't know about that. But I always figured, if
the person was dead, what difference did it make if
he was dead a year or two weeks or a hundred, if he
was dead when his book was printed, you know.
51
Book Publishing and Illustrating
Teiser: You mentioned the other day that you worked with
Random House on several books.
Grabhorn : Yes .
Teiser: How did your connection with them start?
Grabhorn: When Bennett Cerf started it, he came to Calif
ornia. He and I went to lunch together. And
somehow or another he wanted me to print three
books for them one year. I printed two. but I
never made the third. One book was the Life of
Benvenuto Cellini. The other was The Red Badge
of Courage. The third was a book by Hawthorne-
it was a long book, two volumes. What was it?
Teiser: I don't know. The Scarlet Letter is short.
Grabhorn: No, it wasn't The Scarlet Letter. Valenti Angelo
was working for me. He went back east and he took
the designs for the book with him and had the
Limited Editions Club reproduce it.
Teiser: The same book that you were going to print?
Grabhorn: Yes. I got into a terrible fight with the Limited
Editions Club. When they first started in business,
they wrote to me and wanted me to print Robinson
Crusoe. They offered me $15,000 for 1500 copies.
The fellow's name was Macy. He was going to furnish
me all the illustrations by a well-known illustrator
He sent the cuts out to me and claimed they cost him
52
Grabhorn: $1500. And I wrote back and said he was a liar.
Then he took the $1500 off the price he was paying
me for the books. He was to pay me $15,000. The
final check was around $700 or $800. He sent the
cuts out to me by mail and put $25 postage stamps
on them and asked me to send the stamps back to him
because his boy was collecting stamps. I sent the
stamps back. Then he charged me the $25 for the
postage. One letter led to another and we got into
a terrible fight. My final check on that—when
the job was f i ni shed--was about $500 or $600, after
he subtracted all the money he could. I got so mad.
They wanted me to print some more books, and I
wouldn't print anything. I said No.
I remember one time Farquhar came and had me
go to lunch with a friend of his, a librarian of the
Rhode Island Historical Society. All during the
lunch hour, all they talked about was what a crook
Roosevelt was, which irritated me because I liked
Roosevelt very much. I printed two books for him.
He never knew there was anything going on in
America like fine printing until after I printed
those books. Then he never forgot it. He used to
tell everbody he had me print them, you know.
Teiser: One was Naval
Grabhorn: Naval Sketches of the War in California.
53 <
Teiser: What was the other?
Grabhorn: Both were the same. You have the original over there
in Bancroft. It was given to you by Kenneth Bechtel
It was offered to me once for $15,000. I didn't
have $15,000. I had printed two books of those
kinds of sketches, and I was rather disgusted with
printing any more of them.
Teiser: How did President Roosevelt happen to come to you
to print them?
Grabhorn: Well, he was talking to Bennett Cerf. He wanted to
get the book printed, but it was so expensive to
do. Roosevelt was a rather close buyer, you know.
Nobody could touch him. So Cerf said to him that
he was coming out to San Francisco and he'd bring
them out to me and have me print the books.
Tei ser : So he di d?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: Were they ever on sale?
Grabhorn: Oh, yes. But Random House had very poor marketing
conditions. I didn't like to do books for them.
If they had any books left January 1 , no matter
what book it was, they remaindered them. And when
you print a book for $25 and on January 1 it comes
out for $5, it kills the sale of the book among
book dealers, because they don't like that. That's
what killed John Henry Nash's bi bl i ography--three
54
Grabhorn: volumes. He couldn't sell it very fast and he
remaindered some copies. And of course you could
buy it for almost any price after it had been re
maindered. Book dealers had bought copies at maybe
$50, and they could've bought it before [after]
Chri stmas .
Teiser: Those were the Clark bibliographies?
Grabhorn: No, the Cowan bibliographies.
Teiser: How was it that John Henry Nash couldn't stay afloat
financially when you could?
Grabhorn: Well, the pri nter--when you brag about how much
money you get, the tradesmen begin overcharging
you, you see? He was overcharged for everything.
Teiser: He was?
Grabhorn: Probably, yes.
Teiser: He did things very big and fancy too. I suppose
he couldn't scale himself down.
Grabhorn: No. Nobody should tie up to one millionaire, one
prince. You'll lose your shirt if you do.
Teiser: There were always many people interested in buying
your books, weren't there?
Grabhorn: Yes, we never overpriced them, I don't think.
Teiser: I think you underpriced them often, didn't you?
Grabhorn: Well, I would rather underprice them and sell them
than become a storage house for unsold books.
Teiser: Your Americana series, wasn't that one of the
55
Teiser: wonders of the Depression — that it went over?
Grabhorn: Yes. That was a good idea. We took excessively
rare books and printed them. There were not many
copies of the originals, and we sold them at
prices like $2 and $3.
Teiser: At first —
Grabhorn: No, we never had a book over $3. We sold ten books
in the series, and the series was $25.
Teiser: To dealers or retail?
Grabhorn: Retail. So that was $2.50 apiece. We only charged
$2 for the life of SutterT
Teiser: They went like wildfire, didn't they?
Grabhorn: Well, you know the difference in books going like
wildfire is maybe five extra copies. You see, that
was the Depression. We knew what we had to do was
to make a book valuable for its contents, rather
than just as a book. We went over that pretty
thoroughly. Now, for instance, the life of Joaquin
Murieta**would cost anybody around $500. So when
we printed it for $3 it was a good buy, you see.
Teiser: Valenti Angelo worked with you for quite some time,
didn't he?
Grabhorn: Yes. He first came to the shop — he was an artist
and engraver. He had never worked as a printer
before. But he was a very speedy man. I remember
we did The Scarlet Letter for Random House. There
* • — ~~
Watson, Douglas S., The Life of Johann Augustus
Sutter, 1933.
Joaquin Murieta, 1932.
56
Grabhorn: are twenty-five chapters and I wanted a cut for
every chapter. He went home that night and brought
me the next morning the twenty-five designs for it.
They looked like postage stamps; they were very
small. And I wouldn't use them. He was god-awful.
He wouldn't design anything that looked like Pica'sso
I remember, I was printing the Book of Job and I
wanted to get an unusual picture for it. He came
the next morning with Job--a big folio it was--
with Job naked. And one Jewish collector objected
to it because Job wasn't circumcised. [Laughter]
He said, "You've got an error in the book."
Teiser: Angelo was a skillful artist, was he not?
Grabhorn: Well, he'd do anything and do it quick too. He
wasn't as bad as Maynard Dixon. Maynard Dixon
was in the shop when we got an order from Random
House to print Leaves of Grass. I told Maynard,
and he said, "Let me illustrate it." I said, "You
can't illustrate the Leaves of Grass." I said,
"Listen, Maynard "
He said, "Let me make some illustrations."
He went out of the shop and came back the next day
with some of the funniest illustrations I ever saw
in my life. He took lines from Whitman--"! loaf
and invite my soul" Then he made a picture of
Maynard Dixon on the top of a hill with the sun
57
Grabhorn: shining on his face, his hat over his head — he
was loafing and inviting his soul. The next one he
picked out was, "I sing the body electric." Then
he had a man and woman standing on a rope over a
chasm and they had sparks going out of their
bodies. They were the funniest thing I ever saw.
I'd have been the laughing stock of America if
I had used them. They had on coarse knit under
wear. I said, "Maynard, I'm sorry, but I can't
use your pictures."
Oh, he got so mad. When you deal with an
artist, you know, they get terribly mad. But, you
know, when they make pictures, the whole world
looks at them, and I would have been ridiculous.
I said, "You can't illustrate Whitman. I
would like to have you make two pictures, one for
the beginning and one for the end."
Teiser: Did he do that?
Grabhorn: No, he didn't do a thing.
Teiser: Did anyone illustrate it? I don't remember.
Grabhorn: Valenti Angelo. We decided, finally, if we were
going to illustrate it we'd take just common wood,
type high, and cut it right there, without pre
liminary designs, so they were sort of rough. My
brother Bob stood over him and watched him cut
these things. And when we got one we thought we
58
Grabhorn: could use, we took it, you see. But even he was
too rapid an artist. You have to be awful careful
dealing with the art work you're putting in a
book. It must go with the type. And I had a
theory: a book was like the human body. And the
back of the book is like your back, with the spinal
cord down the back, and should show all the things
that went to bind the book together. Those cords
should show, as they're part of the book. They
shouldn't be false. They are on most English books
The backs are always false. The paper should be
sewed around the cords; you can see the signature.
Teiser: Mallette Dean did some work for you too?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: Was he easier to work with than the other artists?
Grabhorn: No. You could tell Mallette--we could set up the
pages around here--we wanted the pictures to go
with the pages after they were set up.
Teiser: Did he then make the pictures?
Grabhorn: Not many. He did on a few early books, color
pictures. Then we were printing colored pictures.
<
Teiser: He hand colored them, did he?
Grabhorn: No, we made cuts and printed the cuts.
Teiser: Did he work here as a typesetter or a pressman?
Grabhorn: No, but he did a little of it so he could start
hi s own shop .
59
Teiser: But he was never regularly employed here?
Grabhorn: Never as a typesetter.
Teiser: You never used halftones, did you?
Grabhorn: No, because these presses don't print halftones.
A halftone has to be printed on a rolling press,
so you do not get a flat impression. You get
what you call a pinpoint impression.
Teiser: Because of the dot formation?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: And you didn't want to have any printed for you?
Grabhorn: Yes. Mostly Meriden printed them.
Teiser: Gravure, then?
Grabhorn: Gravure, yes. I did a very big book with gravure
illustrations by Meriden; it was a book on Arizona.
It had a lot of pictures. The Yale Library had
the original drawings of the day*
Teiser: But then many of your illustrations you printed
here?
Grabhorn: Yes. All the pictures my daughter*made for
Shakespeare we printed here.
Teiser: And many on earlier books, too?
Grabhorn: That was according to what kind of illustration.
If there were colors in them, we put the colors
on the press and printed them.
Teiser: You printed the whole things, then?
Grabhorn: Yes. When we printed a book for the Limited
du Bois, John Van Deusen, Campaigns in the Weatt]949
r
Mary Grabhorn
**
60
Grabhorn: Editions Club, we had 1500 illustrations. There
were 1500 books, which was a large edition for
us. And we printed the illustrations and had them
inserted around the pages. The binders did that.
Teiser: You printed them here, though?
Grabhorn : Yes .
Teiser: From wood blocks?
Grabhorn: No, they were colored. I had a boy working for me
who did a sloppy job. He never was very exacting.
This boy is dead now. Jack Gannon was his name.
Teiser: Were they from metal plates?
Grabhorn: Yes, they were zinc etchings. They were the ones
they charged me $1500 for.
Teiser: Did you often print illustrations from metal
plates?
Grabhorn: Yes. Zinc. Very rarely halftones. That kind of
press doesn't print halftones well. It takes a
rolling press to print halftones well.
Teiser: The Shakespeare illustrations were from ?
Grabhorn: Woodblocks.
Teiser: How many colors in most of them?
Grabhorn: I don't know. They were printed on that handpress
there. Mary [Grabhorn] and I did them together on
Saturdays and Sundays.
Teiser: The problem of registration must be great in that
sort of work .
Edwin Grabhorn, 1%1
Reproduction rights reserved
to Marjory B. Farquhar
61
Grabhorn: Not too great.
Teiser: Is the book you're doing now from linoleum blocks?
Grabhorn: No, not necessarily. The linoleum blocks are used
for tinting the paper. It is all creamed, and we
make a little cream impression over the whole
print. It kind of ties it together.
Teiser: What are the other blocks here then, wood?
Grabhorn: No, they're linoleum. But you can't make too fine
a line in linoleum. It'll widen as pressure goes
on it. You have to have pretty fine lines on
some of these, so you have to hit it what you call
del i cately .
Collecting
Teiser: I want to ask about your book collections.
Grabhorn: Oh, that! My God! I could tell you a lot of
things about the Bancroft Library. You see, I
collected a tremendous amount of California
material. I even have all the letters of Bancroft
and Knight*when they first started. I was going
to give them to Bancroft, you know.
Teiser: You have them now?
Grabhorn: Yes. It was Knight who started Bancroft collect
ing. He got out California almanacs. He didn't
have enough material to work with and he insisted
that Bancroft had to buy California books so he
Hubert Howe Bancroft and William H. Knight.
62
Grabhorn: could get the material for his almanacs. That's
how it started. And I got those letters. I'm
sort of a purist. When I have something that be
longs to somebody else, I like to see them get it,
you know.
Teiser: How did you get the Bancroft-Knight letters?
Grabhorn: His son, Emerson Knight, was a very good friend of
mine; he was one of Knight's sons. He had a brother
who was quite well to do, lived in Arizona. The
brother had books published, part of the letters
published. And the brother sent the letters to
him and he turned them over to me.
Teiser: You certainly have had a talent for gathering
unusual and valuable items. You're a born col
lector, arent you?
Grabhorn: Yes. Well I had this feeling about it: I always had
the printing in the background. And I felt there
were many great reminiscences in the newspapers
that never were put into book form, and there was
an opportunity for books. One time I bought the
Sacramento Union, a file of it, and it had all
Mark Twain's letters from the Hawaiian Islands.
They were never published. We published them in
a book, Mark Twain in Hawaii. He gave a series
of lectures, over there and some over here, about
his times in the Hawaiian Islands. He went over,
63
Grabhorn: I think, in 1866. They were published in the
San Francisco papers.
Teiser: So a lot of your collecting was with an eye
toward publication?
Grabhorn : Yes .
Teiser: Was that why you collected your Americana material,
or did you start collecting first and then decide
to publish some of it?
Grabhorn: I started collecting first and then decided. I
figured when a pamphlet, in that time, cost $1500,
it could be reprinted and sold for $2 or $3 and
would have a ready sale. Such was Joaquin Murieta.
There were at that time several men we called
scouts who were running around in people's houses
and found thi ngs .
Teiser: Do you remember any of their names?
Grabhorn: One man's name was Cashmaker. He was very Jewish.
He got into the business buying old gold. For
instance, during the war, platinum was selling
for a high price. He told me he went to a lady's
house in San Jose and described the value of
platinum to the lady. Then he asked her if she
had any. She said, "Mister, all my cooking uten
sils are platinum." [Laughter]
Cashmaker found the Pownall stuff in an old
house in Oakland. He hid a lot of this stuff, such
64
Grabhorn: as envelopes with Pony Express marks on them.
He hid them behind a rafter in the basement, he
told me. He didn't have enough money to buy all
of it at once. He didn't. And he was such a
character that nobody charged him more than a
dollar or two for anything.
He told me one time he went into a lady's
house and she had a doorstop of gold quartz. She
was using it to stop the door with. He had no
money. He looked at it. He asked her if she had
anything else. She went to another part of the
house. He broke off a piece and took it home and
cracked it up, then took it to the mint. And
they gave him $35 for the gold. That was what
she wanted for the whole bar. So when he went
the next day he gave her the $35 and took all the
quartz with him.
Teiser: Albert Dressier was another scout, wasn't he?
Grabhorn: Albert Dressier. Albert wasnt as good as Cash-
maker.
Teiser: Did you get some things from Dressier too?
Grabhorn: Yes. I bought two copies of the Constitution of
the State of California printed in San Jose, from
Albert Dressier. It was much rarer than the state
constitution printed you see, San Jose was the
capitol of the state, the first capitol of California
65
Grabhorn: And a great deal of things were gotten at San
Jose .
Teiser: Did you say that your first interest in collecting
came through a bookdealer on
Grabhorn: Polk, by the name of H. A. Johnson. He sold me
the Powell's Journey, which he offered first to
the Bancroft. At that time who did you have at
the Bancroft?
Teiser: Priestley, was it?
Grabhorn: No.
Tei ser: Bol ton?
Grabhorn: Bolton. Bolton refused to buy it. He wanted
$925 for it, and I bought it. I didn't know any
thing, but I took his advice on what was valuable.
He sold me a pamphlet called The Pile for $25.
It was printed in San Francisco in 1851. It was
a list of all the rich men in California.
Teiser: Then that whole collection that you bought you
sold to Thomas Streeter, was that it?
Grabhorn: Yes, I sold it to Tom Streeter. Most of it.
A man who lived in Livermore who left his
stuff to the Bancroft Library
Teiser: Tom Norris?
Grabhorn: Tom Norris. He bought that Journey. He also
bought a sketch book with pictures of the pueblos
in California. They have it over there. The
66
Grabhorn: same with the Vischer missions.
Teiser: What journey did he buy? The Powell?
Grabhorn: Powell, which was the first picture of Los Angeles,
San Luis Obispo, San Diego.
Teiser: So you were buying and selling both at the same
time some of the time, were you?
Grabhorn: Some of the time. One time I bought from Cash-
maker a roll of 40, the Mining Laws of the Town
of Columbia, printed there in 1852. I kept giving
them away. I only paid $2 for the forty. But I
gave one to a man who sent it to an auction and it
brought $65. And here I was. I had about twenty
of them left. And [bookseller] George Fields was
printing a catalogue, and I put this item in the
catalogue for $20. We sold every one. The second
one was sold to Thomas Streeter, a book dealer in
the East, New York. And Eberstadt bought two
copies. And he began writing nasty letters that
I was printing them. [Laughter]
Teiser: Were you?
Grabhorn: I wasn't. [Laughter]
At that time I had Douglas Watson working
for me. Douglas Watson used to claim that he was
the grandfather of Herbert Hoover's grandchildren,
because his daughter married Herbert Hoover, Jr.
Teiser: Did he serve as business manager for you at one time?
67
Grabhorn: Yes. He never was a business manager. He worked
for John Howell. He collaborated on Seventy-Five
Years in California.
Teiser: Did you have somebody working for you as a busi
ness manager at one time?
Grabhorn: Yes. Only for a week.
Teiser: Who was he?
Grabhorn: He was Watson.
Teiser: It didn't work?
Grabhorn: No. I didn't need a business manager.
Teiser: You also collected a lot of paintings and American
prints, didn't you?
Grabhorn: Yes.
Teiser: Was this at the same time?
Grabhorn: At the same time. I sold those to a print dealer
in New York.
Teiser: You still have a good many here, haven't you?
Grabhorn: No. I had a lot more. I used to have a tremendous
quantity of California pictures.
Teiser: What dealer did you sell those to?
Grabhorn: He came out from New York. A big print dealer in
New York. He's still in business.
Teiser: Did he put out a catalogue of them?
Grabhorn: No.
Teiser: Then you also collected Japanese prints. Did you
start that later?
68
Grabhorn: Yes, that was started later.
Teiser: How did you happen to start that?
Grabhorn: Oh, I don't know. I was always interested in
pictures. I bought four prints in San Jose that
were all reproductions. I didn't know a repro
duction from an original until after I bought some
I had to pay high prices. I had a friend of mine,
by the name of Eric Mayhill. Eric Mayhill was
with Fox Film photography. He was on the Panay
when it was bombed. He was an Englishman. When
he came back to the United States, I said, "Eric,
you ought to write a book about your experiences."
He said, "I know it, Ed. There isn't a good book
on Chinese art." [Laughter]
I wasn't thinking of Chinese art. I thought-'
he took those pictures, and they showed them all
over the United States.
Teiser: What pictures?
Grabhorn: The bombing of the Panay.
Teiser: Did he then interest you further in Japanese
prints?
Grabhorn: Yes. He had bought a couple of prints and he got
broke. He wanted to sell them.
Teiser: Where did you buy most of your Japanese prints,
from the Orient or in this country?
Grabhorn: From Japan. I paid a high price for the first one.
69
Grabhorn: It was a Hiroshige. I paid $200. I found out
that when you pay $200 for something, you'd better
look into it and see how good it is.
Teiser: Wasn't it difficult to buy directly from the Orient?
Did you know people?
Grabhorn: I knew dealers. I'd been to the Orient in 1936.
Teiser: Oh, you'd been there yourself?
Grabhorn: Yes. And I met a Japanese dealer by the name of
Shatiro Sato. In Japan in every city they had a
print man who authenticated the prints. So if you
were a tourist and went in and bought prints and
they all were forgeries, you could take them to this
man. If he pronounced them forgeries you could
take them back and get your money back.
Teiser: Did you buy prints when you were in the Orient
yoursel f ?
Grabhorn: I didn't have too much money.
Teiser: So you didn't really start buying prints then, but
you knew about them from that period?
Grabhorn: I knew about them, yes.
Teiser: You have never sold any of your Japanese prints,
have you?
Grabhorn: No, because my wife, Irma, wouldn't let me sell
them.
Teiser: So that collection is still intact?
Grabhorn: Yes? Everybody laughed at me, all the California
Mr. and Mrs. Grabhorn were continuing to collect
Japanese prints at the time this interview was
edited in 1968 - R.T.
70
Grabhorn: scouts. They thought I was silly buying Japanese
reproductions while they were selling me good
Cal i forniana .
Teiser: I guess you were right both ways.
Grabhorn: No. I was only right because time made them right
Teiser: Maybe you're one of those people who can spot a
trend coming.
Grabhorn: No. But a lot of the people thought that what I
collected was good all the time. Francis
Farquhar said he thought I would buy the original
Ten Commandments. They'd be cracked a little, but
I would have them. [Laughter]
Teiser: You've always like primitives, haven't you?
American primitive painting?
Grabhorn: Yes. They were cheap, and nobody else liked them.
The scouts used to bring me paintings. I said,
I want to look at them, but I don't want to buy
a Rembrandt." They were all Rembrandts.
[Laughter]
Teiser: You started buying primitives before they were
really popular, didn't you?
Grabhorn: I bought primitives, yes. I had some very good
ones too. There was a man down in Visalia,
California, who painted pictures of birds,
California birds. I bought three or four of his
paintings. All the birds of California. They
71
Grabhorn: were very interesting, very colorful, very
decorati ve .
Teiser: Who was he?
Grabhorn: I forget his name. I had two of his paintings.
Teiser: What happened to that collection?
Grabhorn: It's over in the Oakland Museum. I traded it
for Japanese prints.
Teiser: All of your American primitives?
Grabhorn: All the primitives.
Teiser: And the Oakland Museum had duplicate prints?
Grabhorn: No. They took the paintings from a man I traded
to. A fellow whose name was Packard. I had a
marvelous painting of the Cliff House, the beach
out there. The painting was on copper. It was
about 15 feet 15 inches one way, 12 the other.
It showed the people getting ready to go bathing.
They were all naked, women and men together, un
dressing right there. It showed what California
was in 1850. [Laughter]
Teiser: Where did that go?
Grabhorn: That's in Oakland.
Fine Presses and Fine Printing
Teiser: Back to your collection of books that were
landmarks in fine printing. You owned the
Kelmscott .
72
Grabhorn: Chaucer. Ashendene Morte D'Arthur. I had the
Morte D'Arthur. And I have another Ashendene
book .
Teiser: Do you have some Doves [Press] too?
Grabhorn: Yes. But I didn't like the Ashendene as well
as the Kelmscott.
Teiser: What did you admire about the Kelmscott books?
Grabhorn: Black and white. Ashendene began printing in
green and blue initials. And the ink always was
reduced, never looked as solid as black.
Teiser: Did you think that the Kelmscott Press books
were wel 1 desi gned?
Grabhorn: I think they were well printed though.
Teiser: But not well designed?
Grabhorn: Well, it's a question of what you like. If you
have likes in type, if you say, "I don't like a
type because I can't read it," that doesn't mean
the type is illegible. It means that you're not
familiar with the characters. German printing
could be very beautiful, and you couldn't read
it either, but that's not the fault of the
German. That's the fault of you.
Teiser: And the same with the Kelmscott press, is that
it?
Grabhorn : Yes .
Teiser: Types from that are difficult for most people to
read, I suppose.
73
Grabhorn: Yes. They're not difficult. It's because they
are not familiar.
Teiser: How about all that heavy ornamentation in the
margins, the borders and so forth? Did you admire
that?
Grabhorn: Yes. I did, because it didn't disturb me, be
cause the pages were even in color. Nothing
popped. The page didn't pop at you, didn't have
dis tractions on it.
Teiser: And you admired the presswork?
Grabhorn: I admired the presswork, and I admired the quality
of the ink and the quality of the paper. The
hardest thing about printing is you start to print
a page and you've got to keep that page in front
of you constantly and match the next page with it.
You don't want to go through a book that has what
you call uneven color, one page very light and
one page very dark. That's irritating to you,
you know.
Teiser: What about the typography and design of books,
though, as well as the presswork? What have been
your i deal s?
Grabhorn: My ideals: any distractions from the printed
page are an interference with thought. Thought
must flow rather freely. Let's say you're
reading a page and you come across a curious
74
Grabhorn: ornament, you're disturbed. Besides, a thing
that people don't know about, to a man of taste,
who knows the history of art, a page of type can
speak about five or six languages. The ornament
can be of one generation, the type of another.
And those things are all disturbing factors.
Teiser: Yes, if you know.
Grabhorn: Yes. For instance, a type that's designed by a
steel pen is disturbing to a man who can read
type that's designed by quill pens, because of
the different thickness and thinness of lines.
Teiser: Do you feel they should not be mixed?
Grabhorn: No, they shouldn't be. Nothing on a page should
pop when you're reading it.
Teiser: What about period feeling, or whatever? When you
reprinted classics of Americana, did you try to...
Grabhorn: I had no books earlier than 1860 printed in
America, that I could get a feeling from.
Teiser: What did you do?
Grabhorn: I ignored you take the Powell /journal that
we printed. It's printed in Italian style, Italian
type of printing. That could be disturbing, be
cause it's an 1849 period. We have no good
period printing of 1849 and '50.
Teiser: Are there some good periods in American printing
that you were influenced by?
Powell, H. M. T., The Santa Fe Trail to California,
1931 .
75
Grabhorn: There was one good printer, Houghton-Mi f f 1 i n
Press, that printed books continuously from that
time to the present day. They were always master
craftsmen. They always did good presswork.
Teiser: Were there any individuals involved in it whom
you knew?
Grabhorn: Bruce Rogers.
Teiser: Did you admire Bruce Rogers' work very much?
Grabhorn: I admired Bruce Rogers. He was what you call an
interpretive printer. In other words, if he was
doing something for milliners it had a feminine
look, you know.
Teiser: This you did, too.
Grabhorn: A little bit.
Teiser: Haven't you always tried to make the look of the
book suit the subject matter?
Grabhorn: Yes. I always believed the title page was the
front door to your house. By the looks of that
you wondered if the house was attractive. I got
into a lot of trouble. I printed a book called
Robinson Crusoe for the Limited Editions Club. A
man by the name of Edward Wilson did the designs.
I had to use them. And he had everything on the
title page except the back yard, you know. So I
cut it apart and threw away parts of his design.
He got very mad and wanted to sue me for doing it.
76
Grabhorn: I figured it was too cluttered up with guns and
shovels and things like that.
Teiser: You have always allowed your own title pages,
though, to be tours de force? I mean in contrast
to the text, which should not have distractions.
Grabhorn: As I just said, the title page was the front door.
You knew what you were going to see after you
turned it over.
Teiser: But the title page might be quite elaborate com
pared to the text?
Grabhorn : Yes .
Teiser: Colors, many colors?
Grabhorn: Not too many.
Teiser: How have you felt about the use of colors in
printing?
Grabhorn: I never thought much about it. It was sort of
background for red and blue initial, because all
printing was copied from manuscript books and
they were always beautifully colored.
Teiser: But you have not used many colors, have you?
Grabhorn: Sometimes, but I didn't like to use too many. In
the first place, there's very little type designed
for red and colors. It's much thinner, the body
of the type, and it should be stronger. In other
words, a red initial of the same type as the book
is too weak.
77
Teiser: When you worked out books in advance of printing
them, I imagine you thought them out....
Grabhorn: Listen, trial and error procedure. Lots of times
we halfway printed a book and then threw it all
in the ashcan and started it over because the
idea was too silly to carry through.
Teiser: It wasn't working out?
Grabhorn : Yes .
Teiser: I think you did that with Leaves of Grass, did
you not?
Grabhorn: Yes. Scarlet Letter also.
Teiser: What do you consider the best book you printed?
Grabhorn: People always ask me that. I think one of the
best books was Cabeza de Vaca.* It was printed
ni cely .
Teiser: It lived up to your ideals of what it should have
been?
Grabhorn: Yes. And it was a readable type. Whether it was
Spanish or not--and I didn't think it was. ...We
had had a fellow working with us by the name of
Valenti Angelo. He always was hasty in making
pictures when we were printing a new book. They
may look good as pictures, but they didn't fit
the text.
Teiser: But in Cabeza de Vaca they did fit?
*
Relation of Cabeza de Vaca, 1929.
78
Grabhorn: No. We had to redesign it. Because he wouldn't
hesitate to draw the coat of arms of Cabeza de
Vaca, but he never attempted to look it up. And
the coat of arms has to be as carefully designed
as anything.
Teiser: Did he redo everything himself then, for that book?
Are the final designs in it his?
Grabhorn : Yes .
Teiser: But you made him redo them?
Grabhorn: We made him study something about coats of arms.
Teiser: Did you reject his first designs, then?
Grabhorn: I think we must have. We always rejected a lot
of things. For instance, his designs for The
Scarlet Letter were never used.
Teiser: What was the worst book you've printed? [Long
pause. Laughter]
Grabhorn: You know, when I go to a place and people show me
books we've printed, I have no memory of ever doing
them. I'm as surprised as they are.
Teiser: Do you like them in general?
Grabhorn: I think they're pretty good. I used to object
very much to the elaborateness of Nash. I mean he
used to do a $50 book and take the designs from
the ten-cent store.
Teiser: Did you consider his printing pretentious?
Grabhorn: No. I consider his work was a waste of time. You
79
Grabhorn: know, after all, ruling a page is imitation of
old manuscript pages, which were always ruled in
red ink. And you should never do an imitation of
anything that was done by hand because the bril
liance of the handwork, the nervousness of it, is
lost. There's no nervousness in the mechanical
• rule .
Teiser: Did you admire John Henry Nash's typography,
other than the rules, though?
Grabhorn: Not necessarily, but that's no fault against him.
I think Nash suffers from what most Americans
suffer from, to be overrated or underrated, you
know. I mean, he printed a couple of little books
by Eugene Field, How Willie Wet the Bed. Now that
shouldn't be done with hand-made paper, you know,
as Americana. It shouldn't be done like a Clark
catal ogue .
Tesier: How about his Dante, how would you rate that?
Grabhorn: I wouldn't rate it because it has no feeling of
Dante. The only feeling of Dante is made by
Aldus. Aldus printed the first Dantes. They were
small books in italic type with Roman capitals.
Hi s was a 1 arge f ol io .
Teiser: That brings up the sizes of books. As I remember,
people used to kid you about never printing little
books, always printing huge books.
80
Grabhorn: Well, I found out, too it was a matter of price.
You print a little book and put a lot of work into
it and the most you get for it is $3. You print
very big books, even if they have only half a
dozen pages, you can justify $20, $25 for the
pri ce .
Teiser: So that was really why?
Grabhorn: Yes. I printed the Sutter, a very small book and
charged $2 for it.
Teiser: Did you think it was a good book?
Grabhorn: It was a nice little book, yes.
Teiser: If there were no economic factors, would you have
preferred to print small books?
Grabhorn: No.
Teiser: Does a large book give you more scope?
Grabhorn: A small book is harder to design. It's harder to
make it look good. Why do you think people buy
Rolls Royces, or big automobiles?
Teiser: Do you remember Nash's early work, the Tomoye Press
books, those little ones?
Grabhorn: He worked for Paul Elder.
Teiser: Do you remember seeing those books?
Grabhorn : Yes .
Teiser: Do you like those?
Grabhorn: No, I never liked those. Paul Elder had a better
printer before Nash. I think his name was
81
Grabhorn: [John B.] Swart.
Telser: You thought he was better?
Grabhorn: He was better, yes.
Teiser: How about Taylor and Taylor? Did you admire their
work?
Grabhorn: I admire Ed Taylor very much. Ed Taylor was a man
of taste. One time I was arguing in a sort of
way with a painting collector who collected
modern paintings, and I said to him, "How do you
like this Picasso stuff?"
"Oh," he said, "the trouble with most people,
they go to a museum, they walk in, they walk out,
and they say they don't like it. You must give
some thought to it. If you live with it you find
you come to like it."
I said, "Well, I think art was born and died
with James McNeil Whistler."
He said, "Whistler was a man of taste, but it
takes more than taste to paint a picture." So I
never could look at another Whistler after that.
[Laughter]
Teiser: I asked you what you think the worst book you
ever printed was. Can you think of any you wish
you hadn't done?
Grabhorn: Yes. A man came in on Kearny Street. I printed
a book of sonnets for him. About as bad as any
thing I ever did.
82
Teiser: Your printing or the sonnets?
Grabhorn: My printing.
Teiser: You'd rather not think about it, I suppose.
Grabhorn : Yes .
Teiser: I suppose most of your work does still please
you, doesn't it?
Grabhorn: No. I never liked to look at it after. I never
was one to fall in love with my own work. And
I'm always surprised when somebody shows me
something I've printed; I don't believe it.
Teiser: [Reading from book] This Fortunate A/an, by Edward
DeWitt Taylor: "Who can deny that Gutenberg,
Aldus, Bodoni , William Morris, our own beloved
Benjamin Franklin, and men such as George Jones of
London, Updike of Boston, and the Grabhorns right
here in San Francisco, in fact all those who have
added luster to the great art of printing "
Grabhorn: Jones was from London, but he visited over here.
Teiser: Was he very good?
Grabhorn: Yes, he had a pretty good reputation.
Teiser: Edward DeWitt Taylor admired you, then.
Grabhorn: He admired everybody.
Teiser: Did you think he was a good printer?
Grabhorn: Henry was a good printer. Edward had too much
theory; too much influenced by Updike. You must
look at printers as men who go to a masquerade ball
83
Grabhorn: They go in a dress-up suit and formal, and they
are out of place among their contemporaries.
Teiser: That was the case with Edward Taylor?
Grabhorn: Taylor was always reserved Boston. I have some
thing of a prejudice against Boston. Being a
Califoriiian, I believe we have just as much culture
as they have on the east coast.
Teiser: And more freedom of expression?
Grabhorn: Yes. More individual. Not so Puritan. They used
to call the California school of printing, of
which Nash was the leader, they used to call us
unnecessary. In fact, Carl Rollins wrote a series
of articles against California printers. And I
wrote a series of letters back to him in opposition
to his ideas. He said California printing was
like California oranges and like the women, when
you bit into them there's nothing there. I wrote
back and said, "We don't bite our women."
[Laughter]
Teiser: Who was this?
Grabhorn: Carl Rollins. He was from Yale. Rogers worked
at his place somewhat. I later knew him. His wife
still lives in Mill Valley. His daughter's
married; his son-in-law is a prominent lawyer by
the name of Green. I haven't seen her for many
years .
84
Teiser: You have always maintained
Grabhorn: I've maintained it's a damn poor dog that won't
fight for his own kennel. In fact, we issued a
broadside, that was very good, against him one
time. I think I have a copy. It's "They Haven't
Rai sed Pri nti ng to An Art." We made a picture
out of the rules at the bottom of it.
Teiser: Who ' s they?
Grabhorn: The East. "A new art has been discovered."
Teiser: You often created things for fun like that,
didn't you?
Grabhorn: Not too often, but sometimes.
Teiser: What's going to happen to fine printing? Who's
going to carry it on?
Grabhorn: Well, you know—who carried it on to us? Fine
printing? There's no such thing as fine printing;
it's only a workman who's serious, who takes pride
in his work .
Teiser: Are there any now? Young ones?
Grabhorn: I don't think the world's going to die, do you?
Teiser: No, but I wonder if the economic system under
which you were able to print as freely as you
did is gone.
Grabhorn: Yes. But as things grow steadily harder to get,
they'll increase in price, so the price will
attract them in to do fine printing.
85
Tenser: The price of the earlier fine printing will
attract others in the future?
Grabhorn : Yes .
Teiser: You don't know of any now who look as if they're
coming up?
Grabhorn: No. But I know that the youth are awful ambitious;
young people in college. No, it isn't lost.
Nothing is lost here.
Teiser: Even though there is not direct continuity?
Grabhorn: No. I had a little saying one time. I always
thought it was sort of a poem: "Make the best
that in you lies. Good work's a thing that never
dies." [Laughter]
A pri nter. . . .one time I tried to do some good
work, and I said, "Oh, they don't know it!"
He said to me, "You're not responsible for
what they don't know." I think that's the best
thing I ever heard. I'm not responsible for what
they don't know, so I'm going to work and show
them what they ought to know.
Francis P. Farquhar (right) and Dale L. Morgan
signing each other's copies of G.P.H., An Informal
Record of George P. Hammond and His Era In The
Bancroft Library, 1965. designed and printed by
Lawton and Alfred Kennedy. Friends of The Bancroft
Library meeting, May 23, 1965. Reproduction rights
reserved to Marjory B. Farquhar.
86
"Comments on Some
Bay Area Fine Printers"
by
Francis P. Farquhar
April 1, 1968
Because circumstances prevented Francis P. Farquhar
from interviewing Edwin Grabhorn, as was originally planned,
the Regional Oral History Office asked Mr. Farquhar to make
comments upon the Grabhorn brothers and other printers of
his acquaintance for inclusion in the Edwin Grabhorn inter
view volume. They follow here, with few changes from the
original transcript of the tape Mr. Farquhar made.
Mr. Farquhar earlier briefly discussed San Francisco Bay
Area printing in his full-length interview , and he initiated
the Regional Oral History Office series on the subject when
in 1960 he interviewed Edward DeWitt Taylor.*
*
Farquhar, Francis P., "On Accounting, Mountaineering, and
the National Parks," typed transcript of a tape-recorded
interview conducted by Willa K. Baum, Univ. of Calif. General
Library Regional Cultural History Project, (Berkeley, I960]
pp. 376. In Bdncroft Library.
* *
In appendix of Farquhar interview, pp. 296-341.
87
Francis P. Farquhar
April 1 , 1968
Edwin Grabhorn
Farquhar: This is April 1, 1968. Francis Farquhar speaking
at his home at 2930 Avalon Avenue, Berkeley. I
would like to say a few words about my friend
Edwin Grabhorn and his work as a printer. Ed
has recently retired from printing due to a para
lytic difficulty that makes it impossible for him
to stand up at the press any more. But over a
great many years he has been one of the great
printers of San Francisco, in fact, of a much
wider horizon than that.
He has done a great deal to influence fine
printing in California and has led the parade
without dispute for a long time. He was associated
with his brother Robert during most of the years
of the Grabhorn Press. But Robert was never a
partner. He was a faithful co-worker with his
brother, but Ed was the proprietor of the business
and paid Bob a salary. Bob's work was largely
in the field of composition of typography, of
which he was a great artist, while Ed had general
supervision and did the presswork.
His presswork was in some respects unique.
88
Farquhar: He had a wonderful feeling for just the right
pressure to put on the press to produce the re
sults that he wanted. He always came out with
strong, clearcut results. And he developed his
own method of producing color.
In some of his great color books, the illus
trations were originally on black and white litho
graphs. Then he would take those and superimpose
the color. He could use almost anything for a
method of producing prints. I have seen him pick
up a piece of linoleum off the floor and put it
on the press and come out with a beautiful com
position for the cover of a book.
In the more delicate work he would cut out
the design, color by color, and sometimes put it
through the press fifteen or twenty times. I know
that was the case in some of his Japanese print
books .
Teiser: Did his wife work on those?
Farquhar: His wife, Marjorie, helped him a great deal,
but it was always Ed's work. She did a great many
things in the shop. She passed away some years
ago. Later Ed remarried, to Irma, who has been
very faithful in helping in the transition of his
career from a printer to a semi -i nval i d.
One interesting thing about the Grabhorn Press
is that it had a great freedom and versatility.
89
Farquhar: There was no cut-and-dri ed method. Ed didn't
plan out his compositions or his presswork in
advance. He just went and did it. And he was a
consummate artist. His work showed great artistic
quality, and the freedom from conventionality,
although he never did any striving for unconventional
work. It just came out that way.
He had a keen sense of color and knew how to
make color combinations without any rules. I
don't think he ever studied the techniques at all.
He just went and did it.
One characteristic of his pressowrk was that
he believed in putting ink i nto the paper, not just
on the surface, not just kissing the plate onto the
surface of the paper, but putting the ink into the
paper. And it's likely to last. That's one
reason that these books will probably last for
generati ons .
Teiser: Some people have criticized this. They call it
"punching through" if they don't like it. They
call it a good impression if they do.
Farquhar: There are two different styles in that thing, and
Ed is a master of one of them. He probably could
do the other if he wanted to. But he believes in
putting the ink into the paper.
The atmosphere of his shop was always one of
90
Farquhar: great informality. At first glance it had the
appearance of being pretty well cluttered up.
But he could find his way through all this ir
regularity. It is illustrated very well by a
photograph of Ed that my wife took one time in
the old shop on Commercial Street. Ed is sitting
in a chair and above him is a portrait of John
Henry Nash, who had quite different techniques.
Nash is looking quite sour, and Ed has got a broad
grin on his face, which characterizes them both.
And all around is the clutter. A string is
dangling down from the ceiling, which seems to
have no particular place in the picture, but
actually adds to the characterization as well as
the composition.
Teiser: Was that photograph published, Mr. Farquhar?
Farquhar: It was published in the book about the Grabhorn
Press that David Magee got out.
Ed's work was versatile. He could print a
wide variety of things. He did a great deal of
Californiana during the Depression. He conceived
the idea of getting out a series of books on
California at moderate prices. The first one
Catalogue of Some Five Hundred Examples of the
Printing of Edwin and Robert Grabhorn, 1917-1960.
San Francisco: David Magee; n.d. A special edition
of this catalogue contained twelve illustrations
from photographs by Marjory .Farquhar.
This was generally known as the Americana series.
**
91
Farquhar: was the Joaquin Murieta book, which I edited for
him and wrote a little preface. It sold at a very
moderate price but since then has gone very high
in auction sales.
The Californiana series that he did during
the 1930's was a great success and led on to
other things which continued up until his retire
ment.
He took up the idea of reproducing Japanese
prints. He had made a very wonderful collection
of Japanese prints, of the originals. He worked
out his own way of reproducing them. As I said,
first by black and white lithography, and then
superimposing the color by cutouts. The result
is four or five books of the great Japanese prints,
books that will survive in art collections for
many, many years, I am sure.
Teiser: What about the economic aspects of the Grabhorn
Press from your observation?
Farquhar: Ed never paid any attention to the economic
aspects. He said one time his idea of properly
running the accounts and the financial side was to
have a box outside the door in which you put in
the money that he owed to others, and they could
come and take it. He didn't want to be bothered
with anything else. But actually he knew just
92
Farquhar: about where he stood. He always paid his bills
and people were always ready to pay the price
that he asked for his books. In fact they clamored
for the opportunity to pay it.
Teiser: He was very intelligent about generating books
with the proper editing.
Farquhar: Oh, Ed was very well informed on the subjects
that he printed. I have heard him in a group with
professors of history telling them things in their
own department that they had not been aware of.
And yet Ed never got beyond about the eighth or
ninth grade in grammar school and never went to
college. Nevertheless, he has two Doctor of Laws
degrees. One from Mills College and one from the
University of California.
An interesting episode occurred in the case
of the latter. The Regents voted to give him a
doctor's degree but he said he could not accept
it unless one was given to his brother Robert at
the same time, because he felt that his brother
was equally responsible for the fame of the work
that had been produced by the press. So at the
commencement exercises, the two brothers stood
side by side and the degrees were conferred upon
them simultaneously. Which I think is perhaps a
unique procedure but well merited, and appreciated
by the Grabhorns and all their friends.
93
Teiser: What do you see as Bob Grabhorn's contribution to
the whole? If there was a particular one.
Farquhar: Bob was a connoisseur of type, typography. He
had studied it and had quite a collection of
books on it. And he had a natural flair for making
up a page of type. I think that was his principal
share. He had many other things too. He was a
good balance-wheel in the whole enterprise.
Teiser: Jane Grabhorn gave a little addendum to Bob Grab-
horn's interview and indicated that their per
sonalities balanced each other.
Farquhar: Yes. I think it was something like this: that
when Ed was away Bob went to pieces, when Bob went
away, the press went to pieces. Or maybe it was
vice-versa, I don't recall. [Laughter] Anyhow,
they were a good pair and produced great works of
art. And I think they should be viewed as works
of art and not as commercial propositions, although
they did a great deal of commercial advertising
work .
The works of the Grabhorn Press became col
lectors' items. Book collectors and collectors
of artistic work are all around. And the biblio
graphy of the Grabhorn Press was picked up rapidly
by collectors who checked off [what they had
acquired]--! had a copy and I found at one time I
94
Farquhar: owned eighty-seven percent of the items listed in
that book. In addition to the ones listed, there
were a great many ephemera, like Christmas cards
and greeting cards of many kinds that he did for
his friends, usually without ever sending them a
bill. Those are of great value as artistic
achievements. They were done offhand, as it were,
not with any trial layout.
You'd tell Ed that you wanted to send a New
Year's card or a Christmas card and he'd pick up
something, some type or an old cut out of a box,
and pretty soon you had a work of art.
Teiser: He did many cards for you, did he?
Farquhar: Yes, for a great many years he printed our New
Year's cards. There are some very interesting,
beautiful pieces. Some that he did for people
like Mrs. Elkus, with the Southwest Indians on
them, are really very important things. Although
they are not formal books, they are really great
works of art.
He did a great collection for Tom Morris for
Christmas cards. That series is a great achieve
ment in artistic printing.
In all of this, both the Grabhorns have been
very modest. They never have tried to exalt them
selves in any way. They just went ahead and
printed what came along.
95
Teiser: Where do you feel they stand in the whole printing
tradition of San Francisco?
Farquhar: Grabhorn added versatility and color and originality
to the printing, as a great artist rather than as
a craftsman. Although he was an adequate crafts
man, his leadership evolved from his artistic
concept and his ability to produce beautiful
things in great variety.
Murdock, The Tayjors, and Nash
Farquhar: Would you like me to go back to something about
the beginnings of fine printing in California?
Teiser: Yes, very much.
Farquhar: It's my opinion that the beginning of fine printing
in California that led to its leadership in the
printing world began with Mr. Charles A. Murdock,
back a good many years ago—whether it's in the
'seventies or 'eighties I don't recall. But he
did a lot of good printing. It was in good taste
always. I don't recall just exactly what he did,
but he did the early numbers of the Sierra Club
Bulletin and established a good format for it.
The work was always legible and clean and attractive
Murdock had his own press and he associated with
others later on. Finally he had to give it up.
96
Farquhar: He wrote a little autobiographical sketch
called A Backward Glance at Eighty, which gives
the biographical background.
He had a great influence on the Taylor
brothers, who held him in high regard and succeeded
him in the printing of the Sierra Club Bulletin.
And that's the connection that I had with them.
Edward Taylor started printing in the
partnership called the Stanley-Taylor company.
But then he took it over alone. Finally his
brother joined. His brother Henry went to the
Harvard Business School and studied typography
there and then came back and joined Ed under the
name of Taylor and Taylor.
For a year John Henry Nash was associated
with them and the firm name was Taylor, Nash, and
Taylor. The initials are significant, TNT. It
blew up. It was incompatibility from the start.
They had different concepts of printing and of
different practices.
Nash went his own way and Taylor and Taylor
continued in their production of good, conservative
printing, carefully studied out in every way, the
materials always of the best. Ed Taylor made a
great study of ink and the chemistry of ink.
Later he developed that into the production of
paint for fine oil painting. He found that the
97
Farquhar: paints that painters were using were not always
of the quality that was best adapted to their work,
as for instance, the painting of William Keith.
Keith, in his later days, used a paint that made
his browns turn black. It was a chemical re
action. Edward Taylor made paints that he felt
would stand up better in the course of time, which
I think is true. He himself took up painting and
produced some very fine paintings, and also some
etchi ngs .
Teiser: What has happened to his art work?
Farquhar: Well, they're in many art galleries. I'm sure the
San Francisco Museum of Art has some.
Teiser: Those owned by him, I mean, since his death.
Farquhar: Oh, I don't know. He'd disposed of most of them
by the time of his death. There were one or two
left. We have several of his etchings here. And
he gave us as a wedding present a very interesting
landscape called "Red Barn." Very vivid red roof
he saw one time when coming home from Carmel, made
notes of it and then came home and did an oil
painting of it in his studio.
Teiser: When did he start painting? Was it as a young man?
Farquhar: No, he didn't start painting until well along in
•
years .
Teiser: Did the impetus to his painting come from his
98
Teiser: interest in colors?
Farquhar: Yes, I think so. And in the production of paint
for other artists. And he knew the artists very
well, had close associations with them.
Henry Taylor was more of a student of
typography. I think he looked at some of the
eastern printers, such as Updike, as models a good
deal. But the result of the combination always
was work of great clarity and perfection. They
had a man associated with them, Daniel Buckley,
who did most of the typesetting during the time
that I knew them. And he carried out their ideas
very successfully and was an important influence
in the good quality of their work.
Teiser: Can you compare the characters of the two men?
Farquhar: Well, I don't know. They were both friends of
mine. They were quite different, but I wouldn't
want to go into comparison of characters.
Teiser: I just meant was one of them more sociable, more
outgoing than the other?
Farquhar: No, they were both that way, in their own way.
They complemented each other very well in the
artistic quality of their product.
Teiser: Could you speak a little about their type speci
men book?*
*
Taylor & Taylor, Types, Borders and Miscellany
of Taylor & Taylor, San Francisco, 1939.
99
Farquhar: That, I think, was originally Henry's idea, but
he died before he had done any great amount of work
on it and Ed took it over. And, frankly, I think
he was a little unfair in not giving Henry credit
for the initial idea, which I think Henry had.
Anyhow, Ed added a great deal to it and developed
a unique book in telling the story of each kind of
type by some kind of illustration, actually telling
the story as he set it up in type. It's a re
markable typographic book and one of great interest
and one that I think is very highly thought of by
pri nters .
Teiser: Do you feel that it is their major achievement?
Farquhar: Oh, no. They did so many other things. They did
a lot of printing for the Standard Oil Company, the
Standard Oil Bulletin. Their presswork was very
highly regarded in those things that they did in
quantity. They did a great many things in quantity,
and it was always good work.
Teiser: Good commercial work?
Farquhar: Good commercial work.
Teiser: They also did some things that would be considered
fine printing?
Farquhar: Yes, but they were not in the same category as
the Grabhorns. They didn't print for fine printing.
They stuck pretty well to printing on order. They
100
Farquhar: had to have a definite order, or understanding,
before they printed. It was commercial; it was
a very high type of commercial printing.
Teiser: Where would you place Nash?
Farquhar: Nash is a unique character. He had his own ideas
of printing and he publicized them a great deal.
He was a pompous man, a vain man. He did some
very remarkable work. Some of his work I think
is rather flamboyant, that is, beyond the necessity
of the case. The most remarkable achievement I
know of Nash's is that he printed a volume on, I
think it was Shelley, and one on Coffroth. Cof-
froth was a prizefight promoter. And the two books
look almost exactly the same in general appearance.
Nash had no sense of restraint in any way.
He just flourished. I don't want to be running
down Nash, because he had a great influence on
printing in this area and some of his work is very
fine. But in my opinion, he lacked taste and
certainly he lacked modesty. On the title page of
some of his work, he uses his honorary degree, John
Henry Nash, Litt. D., Honorary.
Teiser: Don't I remember that Nash preferred to be called
Dr. Nash after he received his honorary degree?
Farquhar: He was a vain man, I'm sure of that.
Teiser: Maybe people called him that as a joke.
101
Farquhar: No, no. He wanted to be called that, I'm quite
sure. I have a degree, but I have not gone around
putting it on things I have written.
Teiser: You have a variety of honors. You could put lots
of initials after your name.
Farquhar: I don't think that adds to the work that you do.
Samuel T. Farquhar
Teiser: I wanted to ask you for some biographical infor
mation about your brother [Samuel T. Farquhar].
Farquhar: Sam. Yes. My interest in fine printing came
largely through the influence of my brother. Sam
was in the advertising business and got more and
more interested in typography and studied it and
began to confer with printers. He finally went
into the printing business himself with Johnck
and Seeger. He was with them for some years and
assisted in getting out some very fine pieces of
work. He studied typography a great deal and
had a good typographical library.
Johnck's influence, I think, has not been
sufficiently emphasized in the story of fine
printing in California. He was a good master printer
He was a man brought up in the shop and lived his
printing life in the shop itself, handling type.
And he had excellent taste and was very influential
102
Farquhar: in getting out works of excellent taste. Seeger
was a good accompaniment to him. They worked
with Lawton Kennedy, who did their presswork and
was influenced by them and carried on the tradition
of Johnck a great deal in the excellence of work.
I think the combination of John Johnck and Lawton
Kennedy has had an important influence on the
printing industry in San Francisco. It's not
spectacular, but it's excellent for its cleancut
quality and good taste.
Sam worked with them until one time — he used to
go back and forth on the ferry when he lived in
Berkel ey--and one time he got better acquainted
with a man who was interested in the classics.
He found Sam reading Latin and occasionally Greek.
He himself was a particular devotee of Horace in
the original Latin. They used to read the Latin
together on the ferry. That was James K. Moffitt,
who was a Regent of the University of California.
When the position of printer for the University
became vacant, he proposed Sam's name for it and
Sam became the University Printer. And through his
knowledge of printing and the general business
aspects of it, he combined the printing office
with the publications in the University Press.
They had been separate up to that time.
103
Farquhar: Then they outgrew the little printing shop
on the campus and the University built a new shop
on the corner of Center--ri ght opposite the West
entrance to the Uni versi ty--and moved in there and
got out a great volume of printing for the Univer
sity.
One of their great achievements was the print
ing of the Charter of the United Nations. That was
a job that was given to the University Press, and
Sam had supervision of the whole thing. They had
to print it in, I think it was five, different
languages. They worked out a cooperative agreement
with a Chinese press in San Francisco for the
Chinese text. And the work was carefully super
vised at the United Nations. At the end it became
a rush job. It was a remarkable achievement to
get it out on time so that the delegates could
sign the five original copies.
Teiser: And your brother had charge of this?
Farquhar: He was in charge of the whole job of printing the
United Nations Charter.
Teiser: Mr. Tommasini is so often mentioned....
Farquhar: Sam employed Tommasini and valued his services very
highly. But Tommasini worked under Sam. I don't
think he has been quite fair to Sam in recent
years, in claiming a little more than his share,
104
Farquhar: because it was Sam who supervised the whole work
and brought Tommasini into it. They were always
friendly and I'm still friendly with Tommasini,
but I think he's been a little bit ungenerous to
Sam in some of his statements lately. He is a
good man; he's a good foreman of printing, but
I think it was Sam that really was the inspiration
of the fine work that the University Press did.
Sam was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1890
and went to Harvard, graduated in 1912, came out
to California in 1917, and was in the advertising
business, as I said. He married and lived in
Berkeley the rest of his life.
He was not quite happy in his marriages.
He had two wives from whom he was divorced. Just
before his death he married Hazel, who I think was
very helpful to him. By that time, Sam was in
weakened health. He contracted a very bad cold,
or pneumonia, when he was back East, in Princeton,
and died suddenly there in 1949.
I think he is very highly regarded by the
professional staff of the University who had
contact with him. He had the unique position of
not only knowing printing as a business and as a
craft, but he knew the substance of books. As I
said before, he knew the classics; he was well
105
Farquhar: versed in Latin. He was able to talk with the
professors that had books and things to publish
and got along well with them. He spoke their
language. He understood them and worked with them,
and I think was very much appreciated. He still
is very well remembered in the faculty.
Teiser: Was it when the press was under your brother's
leadership that it started winning awards in the
American Institute of Graphic Arts "fifty books"
exhibits?
Farquhar: Yes, yes. Sam was the one that brought the Univ
ersity Press books into national prominence with
finely printed and finely published books.
Lawton Kennedy and Others
Teiser: You mentioned Lawton Kennedy.
Farquhar: After John Johnck died and that firm dissolved
and Lawton--he was always on his own as a pressman,
but then he set up his own shop as a printer as
well as a pressman. He had developed a great deal
and has expanded and continued to do work of very
fine qual i ty .
Teiser: How long have you known him?
Farquhar: I've known Lawton since the days of Johnck and
Seeger. I don't know the exact dates, but it
must have been in the early 'thirties.
106
Teiser: I think you said you had a part in the controversy
over the printing of the California Historical
Society Quarterly.
Farquhar: Kennedy, for many years, printed the California
Historical Society Quarterly. For some reason
or other, he became at odds with George Harding,
who was a director and very active in the His
torical Society. And George was determined that
Lawton should cease to have any printing for the
Historical Society. Others of us felt that was
most unfair, that he was doing a good job and
should continue. I was one of the leaders in
trying to keep the work for Kennedy and managed
to hold it over for a year or two, but eventually
the influence in Southern California took the
printing away, and it has been done in the South
since then. I think we lost something when we
lost Lawton Kennedy.
Teiser: Your experience with serial publications, your
experience as editor of the Sierra Club Bulletin,
gave you, of course, a particularly good eye.
Farquhar: I was editor of the Sierra Club Bulletin for
some twenty years. Then I was on the publications
committee of the Historical Society. So I was
familiar with the requirements for that kind of
printi ng .
107
Teiser: Are there other printers who have carried
forward this tradition of fine printing?
Farquhar: Haywood Hunt for a long time was one of the
leaders of San Francisco printing, as a crafts
man. I don't know the others so well.
Teiser: Lewis Allen...?
Farquhar: Oh, of course, Lew Allen holds a unique position.
He and his wife do the very finest kind of highly
special work. Their books are very expensive but
they're thoroughly well done and they're great
works of art.
Teiser: Do you feel they're in the Grabhorn tradition?
Farquhar: Yes, not copying in any way, but they're leaders
in fine printing and highly original and artistic
printing, rather than commercial. I don't think
they do very much commercial work.
There are others, but I'm not familiar with
them. I don't want to talk about those with
whom I've not had close association.
Teiser: You have given a very fine picture of not only
the Grabhorns, but of a whole span.
Farquhar: It's an era, just like the era of the late
'nineties, which was still remembered in San
Francisco, not for printing but for writing. In
this group I think you can sum it up through the
establishment of the Roxburghe Club. That was
108
Farquhar: the idea of Sam and of Carl Wheat and a few others.
The Roxburghe Club drew together the people in San
Francisco and vicinity who were interested in fine
printing, and in printing as an art and in book
collecting, and brought together an excellent
group. I think their story is pretty well told
in the Roxburghe Club book that Magee got out.*
Teiser: I wonder if the period did have a peak.
Farquhar: I think the era ended with the end of the Grabhorn
Press. Of course, Bob Grabhorn is continuing with
another partner and doing some excellent things.
But somehow or another the period ending about
ten years ago, the period of the preceeding twenty
years, was the peak of fine printing in California,
in the San Francisco area. While there are still
good printers and will continue to be good printers,
it isn't quite the same.
Chronology of Twenty-Five years. San Francisco:
David Magee; 1954. Printed by the Grabhorn Press.
109
Edwin Grabhorn Interview Index
(For index to Francis P. Farquhar Interview, see page 113)
Americana series, 54-55, 63
Angelo, Valenti, 51, 55-56, 57-58, 77
Anger, Henry, 4-5
Ashendene Press , 72
Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 61-62
Bancroft Library, 53, 61-62, 65-66
Bechtel , Kenneth, 53
Bender, Albert, 10, 24-25, 30-31, 50
Beran, Chris, 22
Book Club of California, 31, 32
Bookbinding, 37-38, 47-48, 49
Bremer , Anne , 31
Camp, Warren, 8
Cashmaker, Jack, 63-64, 66
Cerf , Bennett, 51 , 53
Cliff House, 71
Cobden-Sanderson , Anne, 28-29
Colt's Armory press, see Printing presses
Cowan bibliography, 53-54
Dawson's Book Shop, Los Angeles, 11
Dean, Mallette, 58-59
Dixon, Maynard, 31, 56-57
Dreis , Hazel , 37-38
Dressier, Albert, 64
Drunkenness , 33-34
Eberstadt, 66
Elkus, Albert, 37
Farquhar, Francis P., 46, 52, 70
Ferguson, Milton, 27
Fields, George, 66
French Lick Springs, Inc., 2, 17
Gannon , Jack , 60
Gardner, Walter, 29-30
Goudy, Frederic W., 4, 43, 44
Grabhorn, (Third) Mrs. Edwin (Irma), 69
Grabhorn, Harry, 1-2, 3, 18-19, 20
Grabhorn, Henry, 14-15, 16
no
Grabhorn, Kenneth, 15
Grabhorn , Lewi s , 15
Grabhorn, Mary, 59, 60
Grabhorn, Robert ("Bob"), 22, 29, 32, 46-47, 57
Grabhorn , Wai ter , 15
Grover, Katharine, 46
Grover, Sherwood B. ("Bill"), 46
Hadley, Henry, 6
Harris, Carroll T., 45
Hewitt, Tom, 33
Hoi liday , Wil 1 i am J. , 11
Hoover, Herbert C., 49, 66
Houghton-Mi f f 1 i n Press, 75
Howel 1 , John , 10,67
Hunt, Haywood H. , 59, 9, 21
Illustrations, book, 55-61
Indianapolis, Indiana, 1, 3, 9-15, 19-20, 22, 25
Ink, printing, 24, 41-42
Japanese prints, 67-70, 71
Johnson , H . A. , 65
Jones, George, 82
Keep , Rosal i nd , 31
Kelmscott Press, 71-72
Kennedy, Alfred B. , 31-32
Knight, Emerson, 62
Knight, William H. , 61-62
Kokomo Tire and Rubber Company, 13
Leopard i, Giacomo, 27-28
Liberal Printing Company, Seattle, 3
Liddell , Mark H. , 10
Limited Editions Club, 51-52, 59-60
Lumberman Printing Company, Seattle, 5
McCann, H. K. Company, 25
McLaughlin, Morris, 8
Mackenzie and Harris, 45
Macy, George, 51-52
Magee, David, 33
Max Kuhl Collection, 10
Mayhill , Eric, 68
Meriden Gravure Company, 59
Mills College, 29-30, 31
Monotype Company, 44
Music printing, 2-4, 6-8
Ill
Nash, John Henry, 20-21, 28-30, 53-54, 78-79, 80
Newbegin, John J. ("Jack"), 35
Morris , Thomas W. , 65
Oldfield, Otis, 47-48
Orange Blossom candy store, 34
Pacific Printer, 22
Paper dampening, 22-23, 48
Paper, printing, 48-49
Printing presses, 11, 12, 18, 24, 25, 38-41, 59
Random House, 51, 53, 55, 56
Reinhardt, Aurelia Henry, 30
Rogers , Bruce, 10-1 1 , 75
Rol lins, Carl , 83 , 84
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 52-53
Rothschild, Herbert, 34-37, 38
San Francisco Public Library, 10
Sato, Shatiro, 69
Seattle, Washington, 2-8, 9
Seidner and Van Riper, 13, 20
Shakespeare series, 59, 60
Streeter, Thomas, 65, 66
Studio Press, Indianapolis, 9, 11, 12-14, 20, 25
Swart , John B . , 81
Taggart, Tom, 2, 17-18
Taylor, Edward DeWitt, 81, 82-83
Taylor, Henry H. , 82
Title pages, 16-17, 75-76
Tufts, James ("Jim"), 35-36
Types
(in general) 39-40, 42-45, 72-73, 74,76
Goudy, 4, 25, 43
Caslon, 25
Kennerley, 43
Franciscan, 43, 44-45
Typesetting, 1-2, 3-4, 6-7, 45-47
Unions, printing trades, 22, 26-27
University Press, Seattle, 5
Updi ke, Daniel B . , 82
Watson, Douglas S., 55, 66-67
Wheeler, William, 37-38, 47
Wilson, Edward, 75-76
I
Zellerbach Paper Company, 49
.
.
•
112
BOOKS PRINTED BY THE GRABHORN PRESS
Book of Job, The , 56
Campaigns in the Vest , 59
Gracious Visitation, The, 31-32
Harte, Bret, 35-36
Joaquin Murieta, 55, 63
Leaves of Grass, 23, 37, 48, 49, 56-58, 77
Letter of Christopher Columbus, The, 31, 32
Letters of Oscar Weil, The, 31
Life of Johann Augustus Sutter, The, 55, 80
Mark Twain in Hawaii, 62-63
Naval Sketches of the War in California, 52-53
Relation of Cabeza de Vaca, 77-78
Robinson Crusoe, 51-52, 75
Santa Fe Trail to California, The, 74
Scarlet Letter, The, 55-56, 77, 78
Two years Before the Mast, 45, 46, 47
Typography of Shakespere's Midsommer Nighte's Dreame, The, 10
113
Francis P. Farquhar Interview Index
(For index to Edwin Grabhorn Interview, see page 109)
Allen, Lewis , 107
Allen, Mrs. Lewis (Dorothy), 107
American Institute of Graphic Arts, 105
Americana series, Grabhorn Press, 90-91
Buckley, Daniel , 98
California Historical Society, 106
Elkus , Mrs. 94
Farquhar, Mrs. Francis P. (Marjory), 90
Farquhar, Samuel T., 101-105, 108
Grabhorn, Edwin, 87-95
Grabhorn, (second) Mrs. Edwin (Marjorie), 88
Grabhorn, (third) Mrs. Edwin (Irma), 88
Grabhorn Press, 87-95, 99, 108
Grabhorn, Robert ("Bob"), 87, 92-93, 94, 108
Harding, George, 106
Hunt, Haywood H. , 107
Illustrations, book, 88, 91
Japanese prints, 91
Johnck, John, 101-102, 105
Johnck and Seeger, 101-102, 105
Keith, William, 97
Kennedy, Lawton, 102, 105-106
Magee, David, 90, 108
Moffitt, James K. , 102
Murdock, Charles A. , 95-96
Nash, John Henry, 90-96, 100-101
Morris , Thomas W . , 94
Roxburghe Club, 107-108
Seeger, Harold, 102
Sierra Club Bulletin, 95, 96, 106
Standard Oil Bulletin, 99
Stanley-Taylor Company, 96
114
Taylor, Edward DeWitt, 96-100
Taylor, Henry A., 96, 98-100
Taylor, Nash and Taylor, 96
Taylor and Taylor, 96, 98-100
Tommasini, Amadeo, 103-104
United Nations Charter, printing of, 103-104
University of California Press, 102-105
Updi ke, Daniel B. , 98
Wheat, Carl , 108
San Francisco Chronicle - Wednesday, December 18, 1968
Renowned Printer
I
*
in Grabhorn
Is Dead at 79
Edwin Grabhorn. re-
sowned San- Francisco print
er died Monday at the age
8*79. after along Illness.
HP was a member of the
Ro h e m i a n and Zamoran
Clubs.
jpfeurvivor's include liis wife.
Jfina; a daughter by a pre
vious marriage, Mary Grab-
hern, an artist living in Lon
don: a sister,, Emma Smoyer
..-.
AWARDS
Returning to Indianapolis,.
h*; worked as a journeyman
printer until he saved enough ,
tiTbuy ,'the fonts of Goudy-.'
tjj»ifr' accessary to establish".
tije Studio, Press.
.'December of 1919, Ed-
i Grabhorn packed up hi* ^
cious type and with his-:
•brother Robert, 11 years
votmger, headed West again;,
time, San Francisco. \
EDWIN GRABHORN
A long career
; PERFECTIONISTS
eth.
•"He was cofotxnder with
*te brother, RoBfei-t. of the
G v a b'h o r n T*fess. es-
tab!ished in 1920 and dis-
«£lved in 1965,,:- .-*;*
he Grabhorn Press,
books all became col
ors' items, was once de-
•ibed as "a citadel of fine
the equal of which would
hard to come by in Gerr
ny, Italy, Switzerland, the
•therlands or any other
itry where the art of
tag is practiced."
BEGINNINGS
mas Eve and the next month , unassuming a man to intend>
bought an old Colt Laureate lathing persoaaL but the
press (a sheet at a time) and ' c 0 m m e n t -appRes to S»e 1
set up a smaU plant above; Grabhorni. ^^ wjth
the old Orange Blossom can- l alteration: ttey *•** so
dy factory at 47 I&ar.^, exquisite specimen* of that
street. f.: art that tiiey had no time to
ON PRINTING )x , 'tensely absorbed In creating
JntMn the decade the* *cd Prints of Old Japan/' an'edi-
international recognition V***10" of 4°0 *»t sold for $35'
tfife medal of the AawrfcM' each. Edwin G r a b h o r n. a
Institute of Graphic Ar$8 &JFJ craftsman more concerned
"The Letter of Amerigo VesN " with his- art Snan money (as
" considered the feestj was Robert), spetjt nine
"'* b<XJ|b,piiblish«i Ittjmontks'on that work — con-
. an exhibit «f
ijob" in the
*Edwln Grabhorn,
Cincinnati, first
a native
, became
ainted with, printing in
uncle's music publishing'
in Indianapolis, where
learned the 400 character
"music case" of type.
work for a music printer at
U2 a week. There he met;
Henry Anger, known as the
"artist printer" of Seattle,
sfid Haywood Hunt, since
1915 a printer in San Francis-
JThey introduced hisn to the
work of the great American
printer and type designer.
Frederic W. Goudy, and
young Grabhorn soon forsook
sidered by some connois
seurs as one jjf the iin_est cx-
amotes of art printing ever '
Grabhorn broflrf. (John Howell. bookseller, re- {
the GrapJB Po^1* ls currentl" P"0^ at '
's medal of S150-'
tbV-13 Some years ago a noted
*S"t British type designer, visit
ing here, commented: ''Sir,:
the Grabhorns are not the!
•A welf-imade boo> 6s-OBe> best printers in San Francis-
of the mosf*'(lMrab\e>'Ob]ectt< co — they're the best in the
made by man," EdfrljipMlv world!"
horn once wrote, am 'th* APPRKPIATIOV
fact that some 42 copfcs of
the Gutenberg Bible had sar»v Why had they picked San
come the 'seat '61 a perm*."
ncnt Renaissance . ."
Twelve years later M*
prophecy had undergone a
radical revision. In 1960 he
a reporter, without sad-
v w t r
vbftd the dustings of 400:, Francisco? Edwin, writing in
yttrs.
1948. said they were attract-
ihe treble clef for the printed %%£"& JJK
VFAvH
"If the present-day printer ed by San Francisco's cli-
cfffl recapture the strength ' mate, "especially beneficial
the iMfc- to the best kind of printing."
. but put "With such natural advan-
own dewtages," he wrote, "and with
ana age u*w»-ms books, jif a growing, appreciative audi- ; neiu ai n a.m. wmwi-uw
will not nave to worry about ence, there is no reason why ((Thursday ) at Halsted & Co.,
century printer .
so*ething of his
and age into -his
ly asamatteroffaet: •
"Ever>f year we get clo»er
and closer to extinction . . .
People don't have libraries
any more. They have TVs.
Most of our books are too ex-
pensive to collect. Every
thing is changing. We've out
lived our usefulness."
Funeral services will be
held at 11 a.m. tomorrow
word.
sured."
ncjgco cannot be- > 1 123 Suiter streets . .,,,
Ruth Teiser
Grew up in Portland, Oregon; came to the Bay Area
in 1932 and has lived here ever since.
Stanford, B. A., M. A. in English, further graduate
work in Western history.
Newspaper and magazine writer in San Francisco since
1943, writing on local history and economic and
business life of the Bay Area.
Book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle
since 1943.
As correspondent for national and western graphic
arts magazines for more than a decade, came to
know the printing community.
12
945
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